Word: laurencin
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Nobody quite agrees about what happened at the banquet after pretty Painter Marie ("Coco") Laurencin fell on top of the pastries. Nor has it been decided whether the two poets who foamed at the mouth and had to be locked in the men's coatroom had eaten soap for fun or had faked an attack of the D.T.'s for the benefit of Leo and Gertrude Stein. And nobody knows just how much wine was drunk by Lolo, the donkey that painted impressionist canvases with its tail...
Died. Marie Laurencin, 72, topflight French modernist painter, famed for her wispy, pastel-toned portraits of doe-eyed young girls in diaphanous gowns; of a heart attack; in Paris. Prim, red-haired Painter Laurencin tried three times to enter Paris' famed Ecole des Beaux Arts, was coldly blocked. Critics labeled her early work "decadent" and "ugly." After World War I, she changed her style, was later described as the only considerable figure who painted like a woman. ("Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses? Girls are so much prettier...
...Henri Martin Barzun, he spent his boyhood among some of the foremost artists around Paris. Novelists Jules Romains and Georges Duhamel were constant visitors, so were Artists Fernand Leger, Albert Gleizes and Marcel Duchamp. "It was," says Barzun, "a seedbed of modernism. Apollinaire dandled me on his knee. Marie Laurencin did a sketch...
Nowadays Paris critics rank Painter Laurencin roughly on a level with Utrillo and Vlaminck. But there was no such accolade when she first started painting half a century ago. Three times she tried to enter Paris' famed Ecole des Beaux Arts, and each time she was coldly refused. Critics called her work "decadent," "ugly," "without talent...
...Marie Laurencin does not paint self-portraits any more. "At my age," she says, shaking her white head, "that is finished now." She lives alone, and except for an occasional spin around Paris in a bus, she seldom goes out. But the mothers with daughters in tow still come to her. Marie Laurencin shrugs at the thought of landscapes or still lifes: "Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses? Girls are so much prettier...