“If you want what is commonly accepted as ‘a straight answer to a straight question,’ don’t go to Marie Laurencin to get it,” Dorothy Todd, the British magazine editor, wrote in 1928. If answers from Laurencin — one of the most notable female painters in interwar France — were anything like her work, of course they wouldn’t be straight, but coy, queer, covert and very pretty. “Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris,” a new exhibition that puts all of the artist’s coded qualities on full display, opened this week at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Born in 1883 in Paris, Laurencin became a central member of the artistic avant-garde, ruled by her friend Picasso, in early 1900s Paris. The Barnes show is the first major solo Laurencin exhibition in the United States in three decades, and the first exhibition of her work to highlight the obvious: Laurencin’s art is unavoidably queer, and noticeably lacking in men.

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Persons: ’ don’t, Marie Laurencin, Dorothy Todd, Laurencin, “ Marie Laurencin, ”, Picasso, Barnes Organizations: British, France —, coy, Barnes Foundation Locations: France, Sapphic Paris, Philadelphia, Paris, United States