Marie Laurencin entered Paris’s Académie Humbert in 1905, interested in painting porcelain. There, she studied under Georges Braque (1882-1963), who brought her to the studio of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), on Rue Ravignan, to broaden the possibilities of her painting. She attended the studio for several years, where she participated intensely in discussions on themes such as the surpassing of fauvism by cubism, especially after poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) presented her with a copy of his 1913 book Les Peintres cubistes: méditations esthétiques [Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations]. Nevertheless, Laurencin never assimilated the cubist spirit; her painting is light and fluid. A recognized illustrator, she made the lithographs of the version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland published in France in 1930. Guitar Player and Two Female Figures (1934) is exemplary of her palette of mild colors, marked by tones of pink and blue, with thin lines between each color field. The scene of the outdoor musical get-together recalls a tradition of similar paintings spanning from Giorgione (c. 1477-1510) to Edouard Manet (1832-1883), revealing the presence of academic themes in Laurencin’s artistic vocabulary.
— MASP Curatorial Team, 2017
The musical dialogue theme shown here abounds with historical and artistic allusions, from Giorgione to Manet, that Laurencin addresses with a sense of compositional balance not without a certain Classical touch. As may be seen in the catalogue raisonné, the female figure with guitar was one of the artist’s recurrent themes.
— Unknown authorship, 1998