About this work
*The Three Graces* (*Les trois grâces*) is an oil on canvas painted by Marie Laurencin in 1921. True to the classical subject — the three goddesses of Greek mythology, Aglaia, Thalia, and Euphrosyne — Laurencin's interpretation has nothing of the sculptural weight or Rubenesque abundance that the theme had accumulated over centuries. In her hands, the trio becomes something altogether more spectral: three slender, soft-edged female figures arranged in close proximity, their forms dissolving into one another through a palette of lyrical melancholy — muted pinks, pale blues, dove-grey, and a dominance of white — that conjures an orderly feminine world in which it is difficult to imagine the male.
Her pursuit of a specifically feminine aesthetic, through pastel colors and curvilinear forms, sets the painting apart from every prior treatment of the Graces, ancient or modern. There is no garden bower, no heroic nudity, no mythological fanfare — only the quiet, dreaming intimacy that is Laurencin's signature.
In 1921, Laurencin was able to return to Paris and obtain a divorce, her financial independence secured through a number of sales of her work brokered by Paul Rosenberg.
By that year she had taken up residence in Paris once more and announced her return to the art world with a solo show at Rosenberg's gallery. *The Three Graces* belongs, then, to a pivotal threshold moment — the opening year of what would become the second phase of her long career, her most productive period being the two decades between the wars, during which she produced her most typical and recognizable work.
Laurencin's world became, after the war, far more closed; her experimentation with prevailing artistic trends was dropped in favor of her personal vision, creating the pastel portraits of women for which she is now known. Recasting a subject long dominated by male artists from Raphael to Rubens, Laurencin claims the Three Graces for her own feminine lexicon — the compositions made in these years presenting a veritable feast of homoeroticism, with an exaggeratedly feminine color palette and female subjects staged in evocative stances.
As wall art, this painting rewards a particular kind of stillness. It belongs in rooms that value quietude over spectacle — a pale-walled bedroom, a reading room with morning light, a study where grey and rose already live together in the textiles. The diaphanous female figures rendered in a blue-rose-gray palette integrate naturally with linen, plaster, and aged wood, while the mythological subject lends a note of intellectual weight to what might otherwise read as pure reverie. The viewer it speaks to
