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A natural child born 140 years ago, on October 31 1883 in Paris, Marie Laurencin attended the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre as soon as she finished school. She’s not yet 25. Her friends at the time included Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso and André Derain. She became the muse of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who dedicated some of his poems to her, and sold her first work to Gertrude Stein, the famous American collector.

A free-spirited woman artist, she developed a highly personal style, somewhere between Fauvism and ^Cubism1, with a modernity underpinned by a palette of cameos in greys, blues and pinks, framed by blacks. Thanks to her art dealer Paul Rosenberg, Anne Sinclair’s grandfather, she gained international recognition.

^{1Artistic movements}that emerged at the beginning of the ^20th century: the former advocated color rather than drawing, as was customary in art at the time, while the latter placed the geometrization of subjects at the heart of its works.

Marie Laurencin, Apollinaire et ses amis (2nd version), 1909, Centre Pompidou collection, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris
From left to right: Gertrude Stein (collector), Fernande Olivier (Picasso’s muse), an unidentified woman, Fricka (Picasso’s dog), Guillaume Apollinaire in the center, Pablo Picasso, Marguerite Gillot (poet), Maurice Cremnitz (poet) and Marie Laurencin herself at the piano.

During the 1920s, Marie Laurencin painted personalities from the Paris of the Roaring Twenties, such as Coco Chanel, designed the sets and costumes for the ballet Les Biches with music by Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) and a script by the poet Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) for the Ballets Russes, illustrates the works of poets and writers such as André Gide, Paul Morand… These are just some of the opportunities for Foujita to cross paths and forge a lasting friendship.

At the end of her life in 1956, Marie Laurencin bequeathed her entire estate to her adopted daughter Suzanne Moreau-Laurencin, who in turn designated the Fondation Apprentis d’Auteuil as her successor after her death in the 1970s.

Following the creation Fondation Foujita in 2011, in order to support its initiatives to provide access to art for the most vulnerable young people and families, the Board of Directors ofApprentis d’Auteuil has decided to systematically allocate the royalties collected and to be collected by Apprentis d’Auteuil to the Fondation Foujita.Unless otherwise stipulated by the donor/testator.
Marie Laurencin’s estate falls into this category.