Jene Fille, Color Etching
French painter. Born in Paris, an illegitimate child, she was brought up in relative prosperity, educated at the Lycée Lamartine and studied drawing at the Académie Humbert. She was friendly with Braque and Picasso, and had a lengthy and tumultuous affair with Apollinaire from 1908; he included her in his work on Les peintres cubistes (1913). She first exhibited in the Salon des Independents (1907) and then at the Galerie Barbazouges (1912). Her impact at this time is described in Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. In 1914 she married the German artist Otto von Waerjen, and forced into exile by World War I they escaped to Barcelona. There she contributed poems and articles to Picabia’s Dadaist periodical 391. She continued to correspond with Apollinaire until his death in 1918, and by 1920 was divorced and had returned to Paris.
Increasingly famous, she had exhibitions in Paris, London and other cities, and turned her hand to oils, lithography, water-colours, dress design for the famous art-deco designer Poiret, and wallpaper and textiles for André Groult. She also wrote poetry (Petit bestiaire, 1926), illustrated books and designed the sets and costumes for Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Biches, performed by the Ballets Russes in 1924. She continued to paint portraits, and is especially well known for her elongated, stylized society women.
"Laurencin, Marie." The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography. Basingstoke: Macmillan Publishers Ltd, 2005. Credo Reference. Web. 11 October 2012.
Le Cirque, Lithograph
Painter, born in Argentan, NW France. He studied in Paris, and helped to form the Cubist movement, but later developed his own ‘aesthetic of the machine’ as seen in ‘Contrast of Forms’ (1913, Philadelphia). He also designed theatre sets, taught at Yale University, and painted murals for the UN building in New York (1952). He collaborated on the first ‘art-film’, Le Ballet mécanique, in 1923, and there is a museum dedicated to his work at Biot on the Côte d’Azur.
"Léger, Fernand (4 Feb 1881 – 17 Aug 1955)." The Crystal Reference Encyclopedia. West Chiltington: Crystal Semantics, 2005. Credo Reference. Web. 11 October 2012.
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