MARIE LAURENCIN (PARIS, 1883 – PARIS, 1956) Young Girls at the Castle Oil on canvas 55 x 45 cm. Signed ‘Marie Laurencin’ top right Judging by the young girls’ costumes – gauze tutus – the scene appears to be taking place on a stage, a suggestion reinforced by their affected poses and the dance steps they are sketching out. A strange choreography, however, which features a dog whose raised paw echoes the young girl’s arm. The tree is therefore likely a prop, as is the river in the background, the whole forming a bucolic setting in which these ballet nymphs might be performing. In the distance, on the other side of the riverbank, a third figure waves an immense curtain descending from the roof of a large building, in a gesture that is itself theatrical. As a fictionalised element, this painted backdrop can thus be seen as a picture within a picture. The boundary is all the more blurred between the different elements because Marie Laurencin’s style does not seek a realistic effect, let alone an illusionist one. Her light, airy brushstrokes and her palette of pale, almost diaphanous colours, playing with gradations of pastel shades, maintain the impression of an almost evanescent, dreamlike world. These two young girls might just as easily have stepped out of this unreal castle as ballerinas in a fairy tale. Their simplified features, like their colours, blend into the background. Their brown hair and fair complexions bring them into harmony with the two towers, as if they were their very embodiment. More than theatre, this is painting. Marie Laurencin’s ethereal and harmonious brushwork takes precedence over the subject matter and defines a unique style in which grace vies with poetry. Marie Laurencin (1883–1956) was a French portrait painter, poet and illustrator. Enrolled at the École de Sèvres to train as a porcelain painter, as well as at the Académie Humbert, she became friends with Braque and Picabia. In 1907, she exhibited for the first time at the Salon des Indépendants alongside Picasso and Derain, thus dabbling in Cubism in her famous *Groupe d’artistes*, now in the Baltimore Museum. Her reputation then grew in France, and later in Germany. Exiled to Spain during the First World War, she frequented the Dada scene, though her style proved largely impervious to the influences of those artists. It was during the interwar period that her career as a society portraitist reached its peak. Her distinctive style seeks not so much a likeness to the subject as a recognisable mask created by her palette of flat areas of cool colours. Whilst her portraits are fashionable works, they also express the search for an eternal femininity.