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Marcoussis, Louis [Markus, Louis Casimir Ladislas]
(b Warsaw, 10 Nov 1878; d Cusset, nr Vichy, 22 Oct 1941). French painter and printmaker of Polish birth. The second son in a cultivated family of Jewish origin that had converted to Catholicism, he began studying law in Warsaw but left to enrol in the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. When he refused to follow decorative arts and design, potentially useful in the family’s carpet manufacturing business, his father cut off his allowance, reinstating it only after he won honours in drawing and decided to continue his studies in Paris. In 1903 he enrolled under Jules Lefebvre at the Académie Julian in Paris, where he became friendly with Roger de La Fresnaye and the French painter Robert Lotiron (1886–1966). A casual student, he spent most of his time visiting the Louvre, salon exhibitions, galleries and cafés until 1905, when the subvention from home ended. The first work he exhibited in Paris was an Impressionist landscape at the Salon d’Automne in 1905. Now obliged to support himself, he took advantage of his facility as a draughtsman and submitted illustrations to Parisian magazines of humour and fashion: Vie parisienne, Le Journal and Assiette au beurre. He continued to paint and by 1907 had moved into the orbit of Fauvism. A chance encounter with Guillaume Apollinaire and Georges Braque at the Cirque Médrano in 1910, by which time he was living in bourgeois comfort with Marcelle Humbert as a highly successful illustrator, changed the course of Marcoussis’s life. Presented to Picasso, Marcoussis was startled by Cubism; Picasso in turn was taken with Marcelle, whom he renamed Eva and swept off to Avignon, Ceret and Sorgues. Freed of the pressures of maintaining a middle-class apartment, Marcoussis began to associate with Apollinaire and other younger poets and to experiment with the new painting. At the urging of Apollinaire he changed his surname to that of a small village in the district of Essonne. Although he exhibited in the Section d’Or (see SECTION D’OR (ii)) exhibition of 1912, the year in which he etched Apollinaire’s portrait (Philadelphia, PA, Mus. A.), his own brand of Cubism was closer to that of the Montmartre artists Picasso and Braque than to that of the PUTEAUX GROUP. Like the former he favoured still-life and subjects that made reference to music, but his approach to form remained readable, his Cubist treatment more moderate. He gave up illustration only in 1913, the year in which he married the Polish painter Alicia Halicka; among his last caricatures is one lampooning Cubism. A typical example of his pre-war work is The Cellist (1914; Washington, DC, N.G.A.).
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