Marie Marevna

Marie Marevna (1892-1984) was one of the most fascinating and unlikely figures of the École de Paris, credited as the first woman to become an integral part of the Cubist circle. She was the daughter of a Polish nobleman and a Russian actress, from whom she acquired the name Vorobieff. Her initial studies took place in Moscow and continued in Italy in 1911. It was there that she came to know Maxim Gorky, the great Russian writer, who became a significant influence and encouraging force in her development. He convinced her to change her name to Marevna, taken from a Russian fairy tale about a sea princess.

In 1912, when she traveled to Paris, Marevna became acquainted with the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg, whose friendship placed her in the midst of the artistic milieu with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, André Lhote, Juan Gris, Jean Cocteau, and other members of the École de Paris. In the constant company of such influential contemporaries, her own work developed both inwardly and in the public eye. In 1913 she exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, marking her formal entry into the Parisian avant-garde.

Marevna's most consequential personal relationship was with the Mexican painter Diego Rivera, with whom she had a daughter, Marika, during Rivera's Paris years. Her paintings and drawings offer some of the most intimate visual records of the Montparnasse artistic community during the crucial years before and after the First World War, and her group portraits of the Café de la Rotonde circle preserve the faces of a generation that would soon transform modern art. Following her Paris years, Marevna eventually settled in England, where she continued to paint until her death in 1984.

Her paintings are held today in significant international collections, and she is remembered as a genuinely singular figure whose life and work stand as a vivid document of the extraordinary artistic community of early twentieth-century Paris.