Marie Laurencin Sappho

Artist Marie Laurencin is best known for her enchanting portraits of women and young girls. The Parisian artist was linked to the avant-garde Cubist movement, but she endeavored to disassociate herself from the style as she instead drew on the Impressionist style of Pierre-Auguste Renoir in her paintings and prints, and created poetic, overtly sensual images of women in Fauvism’s subdued pastels at a time when the leagues of male artists around her became famous for making still lifes. 

Just as Renoir and other painters began their careers painting pottery in Limoges, Laurencin trained in porcelain painting in the southwestern suburbs of Paris before she studied oil painting at Académie Humbert alongside influential Cubist painter Georges Braque and French designer and painter Francis Picabia. Her circle consisted of widely known and reputable artists including Braque and Pablo Picasso, with whom she exhibited. Her romantic partners were both male and female over the years, and she repeatedly refused marriage proposals from the most famous art dealer at the time, Sir Joseph Duveen, Baronet. Laurencin had a romantic relationship with French poet Guillaume Apollinaire that lasted six years.

Laurencin produced most of her best known work throughout the 1920s. During this era, she worked with art dealer Paul Rosenberg although she frequently ignored his business advice. Known to only paint children she liked, Laurencin also charged men twice that of women, as well as brunettes more than blondes, and offered discounts for works she enjoyed doing and steeper prices for those she cared less for. 

Laurencin’s work increasingly attracted attention over time — she had more than ten solo exhibitions in 1939 alone and was commissioned for portraits by the likes of Jean Cocteau and Coco Chanel. (Revered fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld — who consistently displayed a knack for synthesizing old and new, high and low — drew on the work of Laurencin in his Spring/Summer 2011 collection for Chanel.)

Laurencin’s six illustrations of "Alice" in a 1930 edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland comprise a small sample of the art she made that is held in the public collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Her works are also held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée d’Orsay and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. In 1983, a museum opened in her honor — the Musée Marie Laurencin in Nagano, Japan. At the time, it was the only museum in the world to focus solely on a female painter. 

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The first decades of the 20th century were a period of artistic upheaval, with modern art movements including Cubism, Surrealism, Futurism and Dadaism questioning centuries of traditional views of what art should be. Using abstraction, experimental forms and interdisciplinary techniques, painters, sculptors, photographers, printmakers and performance artists all pushed the boundaries of creative expression.

Major exhibitions, like the 1913 Armory Show in New York City — also known as the “International Exhibition of Modern Art,” in which works like the radically angular Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp caused a sensation — challenged the perspective of viewers and critics and heralded the arrival of modern art in the United States. But the movement’s revolutionary spirit took shape in the 19th century.

The Industrial Revolution, which ushered in new technology and cultural conditions across the world, transformed art from something mostly commissioned by the wealthy or the church to work that responded to personal experiences. The Impressionist style emerged in 1860s France with artists like Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne and Edgar Degas quickly painting works that captured moments of light and urban life. Around the same time in England, the Pre-Raphaelites, like Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, borrowed from late medieval and early Renaissance art to imbue their art with symbolism and modern ideas of beauty.

Emerging from this disruption of the artistic status quo, modern art went further in rejecting conventions and embracing innovation. The bold legacy of leading modern artists Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dalí, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Piet Mondrian and many others continues to inform visual culture today.

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Decorating with fine art prints — whether they’re figurative prints, abstract prints or another variety — has always been a practical way of bringing a space to life as well as bringing works by an artist you love into your home.

Pursued in the 1960s and ’70s, largely by Pop artists drawn to its associations with mass production, advertising, packaging and seriality, as well as those challenging the primacy of the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke, printmaking was embraced in the 1980s by painters and conceptual artists ranging from David Salle and Elizabeth Murray to Adrian Piper and Sherrie Levine.

Printmaking is the transfer of an image from one surface to another. An artist takes a material like stone, metal, wood or wax, carves, incises, draws or otherwise marks it with an image, inks or paints it and then transfers the image to a piece of paper or other material.

Fine art prints are frequently confused with their more commercial counterparts. After all, our closest connection to the printed image is through mass-produced newspapers, magazines and books, and many people don’t realize that even though prints are editions, they start with an original image created by an artist with the intent of reproducing it in a small batch. Fine art prints are created in strictly limited editions — 20 or 30 or maybe 50 — and are always based on an image created specifically to be made into an edition.

Many people think of revered Dutch artist Rembrandt as a painter but may not know that he was a printmaker as well. His prints have been preserved in time along with the work of other celebrated printmakers such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. These fine art prints are still highly sought after by collectors.

“It’s another tool in the artist’s toolbox, just like painting or sculpture or anything else that an artist uses in the service of mark making or expressing him- or herself,” says International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) vice president Betsy Senior, of New York’s Betsy Senior Fine Art, Inc.

Because artist’s editions tend to be more affordable and available than his or her unique works, they’re more accessible and can be a great opportunity to bring a variety of colors, textures and shapes into a space.

For tight corners, select small fine art prints as opposed to the oversized bold piece you’ll hang as a focal point in the dining area. But be careful not to choose something that is too big for your space. And feel free to lean into it if need be — not every work needs picture-hanging hooks. Leaning a larger fine art print against the wall behind a bookcase can add a stylish installation-type dynamic to your living room. (Read more about how to arrange wall art here.)

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