A High-Living Princess: Violette Murat

UPDATE 10/15: Murat is included in the new book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.

Princess Violette Murat, c. 1928-30
Photograph by Berenice Abbott 

In his memoir Chiaroscuro (1952), Welch painter and "King of the Bohemians" Augustus John described a 1920s dinner party at the home of photographer Curtis Moffatt, "a bit of a sybarite" who married poet Iris Tree:

When he lived in Hampstead, Curtis used to give small parties at which sardines and wine were consumed -- and sometimes hashish. I had already tried smoking this celebrated drug without the slightest result. It was Princess Murat who converted me. She contributed several pots of the substance in the form of a compôte or jam. A teaspoonful was taken at intervals. Having helped myself to the first dose I had almost forgotten it when, catching the eye of Iris Tree across the dinner table, we were both simultaneously seized with uncontrollable laughter about nothing at all. 

 ...The crises of laughter continued with some of us till dawn, with further repercussions as I made my way home with Violette Murat, who had only been slightly amused by the night's proceedings. 

Violette Murat, who turned John onto hashish, was a Bonaparte princess who may have been a lover of Marie Laurencin. The book Cote D'Azur - Inventing The French Riviera includes the following insight into the lifestyles of the rich and famous in the 1920s: “Princess Violette Murat, friends say, not only bought her opium in Toulon, but also rented a submarine in order to smoke it in peace."

Murat is described at another famous dinner party in 1922, where VIP Marcel Proust met James Joyce and Stravinsky: "Princesse Violette Murat flounced out of the party, looking daggers at [Proust] as he arrived. Gossip about her meanness was rife, and she was mortally offended by rumours that one of Proust’s particularly parsimonious characters was based on her. With her strange lack of physical proportions, he once said of her 'She looks more like a truffle than a violet.'"

The Napoleonic family is large and convoluted; everyone has five names, with repetitious family names like Eugene. I've uncovered conflicting information about Murat but I think she is Violette (aka Cecile) Ney D'Elchingen, born September 9, 1878. Granddaughter of Napoleon's marshall Michael Ney, she was the wife of (Eugene) Joachim Murat (1875-1906), a descendant of the Joachim Murat (1767-1815) who married Caroline Bonaparte, Napoleon's sister. Violette died in Paris on July 19, 1936.

Along with VIP Tallulah Bankhead, Murat was part of the Harlem renaissance in the 1920s. Berenice Abbott, who photographed (Eugene?) Murat (shown), wrote of her, “A very high liver. Oh, all kinds of wonderful tales are told about her….She…knew how to make an art out of living and that’s something stupendous. Anything she did became a vibrant, extraordinary event. I can remember seeing her go into a ten-cent store and buy the place out and have a fling doing it.”

NOTES: The 100th anniversary of the publication of Swann's Way, Proust's first volume in A la recherche du temps perdu (aka "In Search of Lost Time") November 14, 2013, will be celebrated the world over.

Born on November 13, 1913 in Paris, Princess Laure Louise Napoléone Eugénie Caroline Murat was a cousin of Violette Murat. In 1939, she married Fernand Auberjonois, a journalist who worked as a foreign correspondent for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade as well as NBC and Voice of America. The couple's son, actor Rene Auberjonois, is best known as Father Mulcahy in the movie M*A*S*H.

UPDATE 3/15 - Just discovered: Tucked in the corner of La Grand Odalisque by Ingres (1814)—a painting commissioned by Violette's grandmother and Napoleon's sister Caroline Bonaparte Murat—is what looks like a hash or opium pipe, along with what looks like an incense burner (complete with smoke). The fan the girl holds looks rather like a hookah mouthpiece.

The painting was “widely criticized” when it appeared, supposedly for the elongation of the girl’s figure (which almost looks like a grand pipe itself, with a big-ass bowl).  

Marie Laurençin: Pot Party Painter

UPDATE 10/15: Laurençin is included in the new book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.
 

Les Invités (The Guests) 1908

"Everybody called Gertrude Stein Gertrude, everybody called Picasso Pablo and Fernande Fernande and everybody called Guillame Apollinaire Guillame and Max Jacob Max, but everybody called Marie Laurençin Marie Laurençin," wrote Gertrude Stein.

Stein purchased Laurençin's Les Invités, the painter's first sale. The painting is a record of an infamous 1908 dinner party where hashish pills were taken at Azon's restaurant in Paris. Laurençin's self portrait is upper left, with knowing eyes, flanked by Picasso and Apollinaire. Fernande Oliver, Picasso's mistress, is bottom right.

The following year, Laurençin painted Un Réunion a la Campagne (A Reunion in the Country), where she is depicted reclining as a hostess would, along with the three from Les Invités and others. Thus Laurençin is possibly the first person to paint a pot party (or two). In the first portrait she is the most fully realized image, and is bringing a flower: was she the instigator for the hashish taking? She may have been a lover of Princess Violette Murat, who could have supplied her.

Marie Laurencin, Diana a la Chasse (Diana of the Hunt) 1908

An illegitimate child, Marie Laurençin was born in Paris in 1883 to a Creole mother who worked as a seamstress. She began her career as a porcelain painter at the Sèvres factory, studied with the flower painter Madeleine Lemaire, and attended the Académie Humbert where she met George Braque. Through Braque, she soon became part of the avant garde artist set in Paris. Source.

The paintings reproduced in Elizabeth Louise Kahn's excellent 2003 biography of Laurençin demonstrate amply her unique and prodigious talent.  In 1907 Laurençin exhibited her paintings at the Salon des Indépendants and was introduced to Apollinaire. The two artists began an affair that lasted until 1913, and she has also been linked with Picasso and with other women. Rodin said called her "a woman who is neither futurist nor cubist. She knows what gracefulness is; it is serpentine." Picasso purchased her painting La Songeuse (1911) and had it all his life.

Max Ernst painted her portrait, as did Cocteau and Rousseau. She kept company with Mary Cassatt and Susanne Valadon. In 1912, Laurençin and two other women (Charlotte Mare and Gaby Villon) fought off angry viewers of the controversial Cubist House with their umbrellas.

Les Chansons de Bilitis 1904 (print)

In Stella Gibbons's wonderful 1932 book Cold Comfort Farm, the heroine advises a protegée not to share her poetry with society people. "Nor must you talk about Marie Laurençin to people who hunt. They will merely think she is your new mare."

Laurençin was named chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 1937 and in 1983, the Marie Laurençin Museum in Nagano-Ken, Japan was inaugurated to celebrate the centenary of her birth. A Japanese influence can be seen in this print (left). Marie Laurençin's 130th birthday is October 31st of this year.

Perhaps Laurençin was also familiar with Alice B. Toklas-style brownies: she was a regular at Gertrude Stein's salon on rue de Fleurus, and remained in contact with Toklas for the rest of her life. "I see Marie Laurençin quite often," Toklas wrote in a 1949 letter. "She wants me to translate for her some of the poems of Emily Dickinson so that she may do some illustrations—most certainly her dish of tea." Sadly, Toklas never did the translations.

In a letter Toklas wrote in 1950 discussing the Cone collection, which had just opened at the Baltimore Museum of Art, she suggests her correspondent look for "a very early Marie Laurençin" and describes Les Invités. Apparently the painting had been sold to the Cone sisters; Claribel Cone met Stein when the two attended Johns Hopkins medical school and the Steins introduced the Cones to the Parisian art scene.