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Marie Laurencin’s Trois Danseuses (ca. 1927) is among two dozen works featured in Almine Rech’s first exhibition dedicated to the French artist, which just opened at its Upper East Side gallery. A prominent figure in the early 20th-century Parisian avant-garde whose market crashed in the early 1990s, the artist is garnering renewed interest among collectors, according to Rech.

Most top auction sales of Laurencin’s work occurred decades ago, but she earned her ninth-best result in 2010, when Femme aux Tulipes (1936) fetched $602,000 at Christie’s, per the Artnet Price Database.

The artist’s auction record stands at $1.4 million, for La Vie au Chateau (1925), which sold in 1989. It was bought by Japanese collector Masahiro Takano, and the result made Laurencin the third-most-expensive female artist at auction that year, following Mary Cassatt and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Marie Laurencin, Trois Danseuses (ca. 1927) © The Estate of Marie Laurencin. Courtesy of the Estate and Almine Rech. Photo: Melissa Castro Duarte.

Born in 1883, Laurencin trained in porcelain painting before studying at the Académie Humbert alongside Georges Braque. As her career progressed, she became one of the only women in the creative collective of artists and writers known as Section d’Or and was closely associated with figures like Francis Picabia and Robert Delaunay, a co-founder the Orphism movement. Though influenced by Fauvism and Cubism, Laurencin developed her own distinct style by blending abstraction with Rococo and decorative arts, often depicting elegant women in dreamy palettes and including queer-coded gestures.

The substantial outing of Laurencin’s work at Rech follows appearances of her paintings in recent group exhibitions and at Art Basel last June, as well as a 2023 exhibition at the Barnes Foundation, all of which have helped raise her profile with a new generation of collectors.

The artist’s Trois Danseuses was created in the 1920s and priced between $170,000 and $190,000. It reflects her “sapphic period,” according to Rech, during which her work began to reference same-sex love, perhaps inspired by her own multiple-gender attractions.

Marie Laurencin, Head of a Young Woman (1926). Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, bequest of Maribel G. Blum.

After Laurencin broke off a relationship with poet Guillaume Apollinaire, she married a German baron and began an affair with Nicole Grout, sister of fashion designer Paul Poiret. The tryst outlasted the short marriage, which dissolved in the early 1920s. Between the wars, Laurencin was a regular guest at Natalie Clifford Barney’s Paris salon, alongside figures like Sylvia Beach, Tamara de Lempicka, and Gertrude Stein.

In a 1952 interview with Time magazine, when asked about her fascination with the female form, Laurencin said, “Why should I paint dead fish, onions, and beer glasses? Girls are so much prettier.”

Marie Laurencin, Portrait d’Gomme (ca. 1913–14) © The Estate of Marie Laurencin. Courtesy of the Estate and Almine Rech. Photo: Dan Bradica.

One of the largest works in the Rech show is not of a woman but of Laurencin’s longtime dealer Paul Rosenberg, with whom she worked from 1920 until her death in 1956. Her estate remains in the hands of the Rosenberg family, which has collaborated with Rech on the exhibition. Some of the works on view remain in the estate’s holdings and are not for sale.