1913

Perfect Little Girls

French, 1883 - 1956

In the years before World War I, when she was making her name in Paris, Marie Laurencin traveled in the circle of Cubist painters and regularly participated in the group’s exhibitions. Her place in that world and the meaning of her work speak volumes about the question of gender in early twentieth-century modern art. Perfect Little Girls presents a domestic interior with a vase of flowers on a table, a framed portrait of a young woman, and a collection of red-bound books in the Bibliothèque rose series for young readers. The title of Les petites filles modèles, by the Countess of Ségur (Perfect Little Girls, 1858), a humorous account of young female friendship, floats across the books’ spines. Both the painting’s abstract and simplified forms and its fusion of image and word connect it to Cubism. Exploration of a feminine world would be Laurencin’s lifelong artistic preoccupation.