Paintings by Marie Laurencin at Nahmad Contemporary: Left, “Jeunes Danseuses” (“Young Dancers”), circa 1925; Right: “Jeune fille au Collier de Perles” (“Young Girl With Pearl Necklace”), 1933. ©Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
By WIll Heinrich
Coming ahead of a retrospective at the Barnes Foundation, this presentation of eight small canvases offers a chance to get acquainted, or reacquainted, with the otherworldly women and girls of the Parisian painter Marie Laurencin (1883-1956). With powder-white skin and black ovals for eyes, pictured against vague backgrounds of gray and smoky pink, her willowy subjects evoke ghosts, or fairies, or porcelain, or Japanese masks. But they also, somehow, look fully human and individual, and Laurencin’s palette and unusual style carry as much information about her models’ feelings, and their social setting, as her drawing does.