2025
As Taurus season unfolds its sensual, earthy embrace, I am once again drawn to the pale, hazy feminine worlds of Marie Laurencin, an artist whose work “Les Amazones” I featured in my 2023 book, The Art of Fantasy: A Visual Sourcebook of All That is Unreal (p. 224 if you’re seeking it in your copy at home!) Though Laurencin herself was born under Scorpio’s intense gaze (on Halloween, no less), there’s something undeniably Taurean about her artistic sensibilities that speaks to my bull-headed heart – that stubborn insistence on surrounding oneself with pillowy softness while simultaneously maintaining firm boundaries about what (and who) gets excluded from your carefully curated paradise.
Born in 1883 in Paris, Laurencin became a central figure in the artistic avant-garde of early 1900s Paris, moving in circles dominated by Picasso and the Cubists. Yet she would later declare that “Cubism has poisoned three years of my life, preventing me from doing any work… As long as I was influenced by the great men who surrounded me I could do nothing.” A statement delivered, one imagines, with the perfect blend of Parisian ennui and withering side-eye.
Living in exile in Spain during the First World War, far from the clubby Parisian scene, Laurencin began to find her own voice. By the time she returned to her native city in 1921, she had traded sharp noses and geometric planes for a distinctly feminine, fantastical aesthetic. Her palette pared back to pinks, light grays, and blues—macaron tints that taste of rosewater and dry champagne. Her prose poem “Le calmant,” published in 1917, speaks to her melancholic state during this exile: “More than bored/Sad/More than sad/Unhappy… More than exiled/Dead/More than dead/Forgotten.” The artistic equivalent of that dog surrounded by flames: “This is fine,” it announces, fur already smoldering.
“Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses? Girls are so much prettier,” Laurencin once remarked, a sentiment that captures her devotion to beauty—a quintessentially Taurean value. Like the bull’s stubborn appreciation for sensual pleasures, Laurencin refused to compromise her vision, creating an alternate reality governed by feminine principles.
Laurencin’s signature style features a diaphanous, gauzy transparency where everything seems to float. Feminine figures with wide-set eyes and hollow gazes drift through creamy pastel landscapes. Her painted worlds sound like strings played with too-gentle fingers, taste like macaron shells that shatter at first bite then melt into something unexpectedly complex—sweetness laced with bitter almond, a confection that offers pleasantries while quietly damning you to hell for a minor transgression that they have never forgotten (le whoopsie, that’s my Taurus showing).
By banishing men from her canvases, Laurencin performed a kind of elegant exorcism, replacing them with something infinitely more interesting (and really, isn’t anything more interesting than a man?). When adapting traditional scenes of courtship and romantic intrigue, she simply excised all male figures, leaving only women and animals in her gossamer tableaux. Male collectors and critics could view her work as delightfully feminine, while her friends from Natalie Clifford Barney’s salons recognized the coded Sapphic paradise she was weaving, a secret garden where women could commune and flourish without explanation or apology.
This duality feels particularly resonant during Taurus season, when we oscillate between the practical concerns of the material world and our deeper yearnings for beauty. Laurencin understood this tension. Her commercially savvy approach (200 promotional posters papering Paris’s wealthy neighborhoods for her 1921 solo show!) funded her creation of private worlds—intimate enclaves, silken sanctuaries where the male gaze had no purchase.
As I sit with her dreamy imagery now, I imagine them as perfumes—complex scents with hidden depths. Perhaps something that opens with cool green narcissus and pale violet, before revealing a heart of ghostly iris and crushed peony petals preserved between the pages of love letters. The base notes would be surprisingly earthy: ambergris washed ashore after a storm, splintered antique wooden picture frames, and a thread of musk that wraps around your wrist like a stray lover’s hair.
I return to the petal-soft splendor of Laurencin’s feminine realms when I need reminding that beauty isn’t frivolous, but subversive, that creating your own reality is sometimes the only reasonable response to an unreasonable world. In this Taurus season, let us be like Laurencin: stubborn in our devotion to beauty, and wickedly clever in how we share it with those who confuse brutalism with truth, those who mistake “great men” for necessary influences, those who demand dead fish, beer glasses, and onions.
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