At the Barnes
Bridget Alsdorf: On Marie Laurencin, 25 January 2024
“... During the First World War, the French artist Marie Laurencin cut off her long plaited hair and posted it to her former lover, Guillaume Apollinaire, who was serving at the front. It was an artistic as well as a personal sacrifice: interlacing serpentine lines are a recurring motif in Laurencin’s work, and femininity its primary theme. In Woman with a Fan (1912), a probable self-portrait, she rhymes the twisted coil of her braid with the unfolding pleats of a fan and the sloping curves of shoulder, neck and breast ... ”