A Rococo Modernist: Marie Laurencin and the theater of (white) femininity within French painting, 18th and 20th centuries
Abstract
The Master thesis proposes a critical review of Marie Laurencin’s mature work, placing it in the tumultuous European context of the first half of the 20th century. Despite its density, her œuvre has been interpreted as “graceful” and “feminine”, which only reinforces gender stereotypes. I propose to further investig-te an interpretation suggested by some critics, according to which Laurencin mobilizes the iconography of the fêtes galantes — the cultural expression of the “French civilization” in the 18th century —, at a time when this very idea was being questioned, with the traumatic episodes of the two World Wars, and the imminent loss of African and Asian colonies. This work presents an investigation of the symbolic capitals of French visual culture, which at the same timereflects and informs the values of society, through highly coded images.
Keywords
Marie Laurencin (1883-1956), French painting, Femininity, Whiteness.