 Good afternoon. Welcome to the Barnes Foundation. Oh wait, thanks. We are so happy that you are here for our public talk on Marie-Laurent-Saint, Saphic Paris, curated by Cindy Kang and Simonetta Fraquelli, and we are super excited just to have you in this audience to hear from the curators and what we'll do is we'll have a conversation and then time for you to ask your questions. Let me ask you, let me just see who's in the room, how many of you have seen the exhibition already? Excellent, excellent. Great. So this will be great for you, perhaps questions that you have having seen it. You get your questions ready and for those who have not yet seen it, this is a beautiful introduction for you. By the way, my name is Valerie Gay. I am the Chief Experience Officer here, the Deputy Director of Audience Engagement and on behalf of Tom Collins, Nancy Harrison and our entire Barnes team, we're so excited that you are here. So without further ado, let me introduce our panelists today. Simonetta Fraquelli, an independent curator specializing in early 20th century European art is consultant curator for the Barnes Foundation. Fraquelli began her career at the Royal Academy of Arts London where she worked for over 20 years on a range of exhibitions. Since 2006, she has collaborated with several leading European and American museums. In 2017, she co-curated one of the largest exhibitions of both Modigliani's work, Modigliani at Tate London with Nancy Harrison. At the Barnes, she co-curated Soutine de Cunin, Conversations in Paint in 2021 and Modigliani up close 2022. Fraquelli has published on many additional artists including Pablo Picasso, Mark Shigal and Gino Severini. She holds advanced degrees from the Cortland Institute of London. Cindy Kang is curator at the Barnes Foundation. Her research and publications have focused on the relationship between painting and decorative arts in the late 19th and early 20th century France. She curated Marie Catolli, the modern thread from Mirol to Man Ray in 2020. At the Barnes and served as the managing curator for the Barnes presentation of Bert Merzold, Woman Impressionists from 2018 to 2019 and Renoir, Father and Son Painting and Cinema 2018. Kang commissioned the 2022 Barnes exhibition Waterwind Breath Southwest Native Art in Community and co-led the institution's land acknowledgement process. She previously held curatorial and research positions at the Bard Graduate Center, the Nelson Akins Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection, and was a scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute. She received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts New York University. Please welcome Simanetta and Cindy. Hello, welcome to everybody here today and to our special friends sitting in the front. There's a dog here. I'm not sure he's supposed to be here. And I wanted to introduce to you briefly the exhibition Marie-Lancein, Saphic Paris with my colleague Cindy Kang. Marie-Lancein was an artist who was working in Paris in the early 20th century. She was very well known during her lifetime. She had incredible success, critical success, material success. She was in fact one of the most sold artists of her generation. Since her death, though, in 1956, her reputation has waned slightly. And the way she's been traditionally taught in art history, certainly in terms of the way both Cindy and I learned art history, she was seen as a more minor figure working alongside the major cubist artists in Paris in the early 20th century. She was the lover of Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet, and it was through her association with Apollinaire that she was usually viewed. When Cindy and I decided to do this show some two years ago now, we really wanted to look at this artist and see how we could understand, first of all, why she was so successful in her life and what she was doing, which was so different to any other artist of the period. Now as a female artist, what we discovered, in fact, is that she created an almost like an alternative reality, a dream-like form of modernism, which was totally unique to her, and which was populated by an aesthetic which was totally female. So looking at her work over this last period, we've really revised, I think, one could say, Cindy, our approach to her work and her role, her unique role in the history of early 20th century art. We opened the exhibition, this is just a photograph of her by Bernice Abbott, the American photographer who was in Paris in the 1920s, and he knew her. She was like Marie-Laurent Saint. She belonged to the queer community, and she photographed a lot of the artists of the period, especially the female artists. And we wanted to just open the exhibition with this image to make this link, which we will talk about a great deal during the next hour, about the network of women that was working in Paris at the time. I'm going to pass you to Cindy. So to introduce you all to Laurence and in the exhibition, we begin with a section on herself portraits. This section gives you a wonderful overview of the whole kind of evolution of her style over the course of her career. It also gives you a sense of, you know, her development as an artist, and it also is trying to push back against some of the critical reception that she has had in her lifetime. Marie-Laurent Saint painted and drew many self-portraits, over 50, over the course of her career. And she was kind of accused of vanity and narcissism for painting and drawing herself so often. This, of course, is gendered because, as we know, Cézanne would never have been accused of vanity for painting and drawing himself. But what we hope to show you is that Laurence used her form in order to explore her artistic voice and in order to experiment with artistic form. You can imagine, you know, as a young artist, who doesn't have a lot of means that painting and drawing yourself was a very efficient way of finding a model. So we start with one of the earliest works in the exhibition, which is this beautiful, luminous drawing from MoMA, where you can see that she is, you know, drawing in a much more realistic style. This is very early in her career. She had just kind of finished going to art school at the Académie Umbert, which was an independent art school that was open to women in the afternoon. And it was there at that art school that she met Georges Brock. She also met Frances Picabia, but they weren't very close yet. That will come later. Sim will tell you about that later. But Brock became one of her close friends, and he really recognized her talent, and he started to kind of introduce her to the avant garde in Paris at the time. So already two years later, she's been circulating in the circles of Picasso. One of the artists that Picasso and his whole circle admire is the self taught artist Henri Rousseau, who, if you know our collection Upstairs of the Barnes, has an amazing, wonderful, beautiful collection of Rousseau. And Laurent St. also admired Rousseau, and you can see this in this self portrait that is so different already, right from that moment drawing from just two years ago. She has completely stylized and flattened her features. She's painting very on very vibrant kind of flat planes of color. There's a naivete to this that is quite quite different from the kind of realistic portrayal of earlier. And here you see mature Laurent St. This is Laurent St. having found her signature style, her artistic voice. She has painted herself in this incredibly enigmatic, you know, mysterious way, and using her now signature palette of pink, blue, and gray. Also, she is accompanied by a shaggy-haired dog in the corner there. This would become a characteristic of her style that women always intertwined with animals. You also see the two blue birds, which allude actually to her love affair with a woman named Nicole Kool, which we'll get into later also. And finally, not finally, I should say, this is an incredibly powerful self-portrait that we were so happy to include in this exhibition. Here you see the woman painter with her model. So you see her holding her paintbrush. She also has a dog again. And the model is kind of painted as an equal to the artist. And there is a beautiful triangulation of gestures between these figures. And then the way that the female painter is looking out at you, at the viewer, so calmly, so confidently, integrating you into the picture and into this scene with her painting, her model. Lauren Sand was also a writer. She was a poet. She was a writer. And we wanted to include a written self-portrait of hers. So this is her memoirs, the original copy of her memoirs, which were published during World War II. They are, like her paintings, incredibly enigmatic. So this is not a tell-all memoir where she's talking about everyone she's left with. She is actually writing these kinds of impressionistic memories from her youth and her childhood in the first half of the book. And in the second half, she publishes a lot of her poetry that she wrote throughout her career. So it's a really interesting, different portrayal of her through the written word. And next to this memoir, we also have an audio recording of her talking in her, you know, having an interview in 1954. This is near the end of her life. But we wanted to include this excerpt of her talking because Lauren Sand during her lifetime was very famous or very well known for her voice. She had a particularly high-pitched voice. I guess it was thought of as very childlike when she was younger. And we think it's really fascinating because this was very much part of her persona. This whole enigmatic female painter persona that she was creating through her work, through her writings, through her presentation. Just actually one thing about the voice. It is, the excerpt is in French, but if you go on to the label there is the little infocus logo, QR logo, which you can go and you can hear the translation into English. So as I said before in the opening statement that her relationship with Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet, was important, certainly, and certainly in terms of the way she was seen subsequently during her career. But we didn't want to focus too much on her relationship with the man, but we couldn't avoid some important gesture of actually acknowledging it because Guillaume Apollinaire did support her. He was the first person to really write about her art early on in terms of her being very feminine. He set up the whole tone for the way she would be described certainly during her lifetime. And so he wanted to include two works which relate to him. Here is a tiny portrait of his head, again in that style, Rousseau-like style which Laurent Saint adopted for a period. And then this other work which we put next to it. In 1913 Apollinaire publishes a compilation of his earlier writings. It includes some poetry and poems which are dedicated to Laurent Saint, but she had previously to that publication just previously to done this particular this work which is called Alcol and has the same title as his compilation of writings. And it's a homage that she pays to him. You see in the painting an oval which we believe to be a portrait of her and this still life in the front. And I wanted to draw your attention also to the arabesque that is there because this form does reappear in many of her works. It is also related to the more sinuous line that she will develop in her signature style after, well, during the First World War really. Now we have talked about her being part of this group of Parisian artists headed really by Picasso, the Bande Picasso as it was known or Picasso's gang. And she would show with these artists. Now historically art historians have not been able to really place her work alongside Braque and Picasso's Cubis works, but this this particular work I just we wanted to show you and we have a couple of them in the exhibition which shows how she is looking at their Cubis work. She's looking at the more flattened form, the more fragmented form sees black lines. Her palette at this point has been pared down. I mean it's not exactly like the palette of the Picasso's still lies, but it does have that kind of pared down look which I think is influencing her from looking at these other artists work. However the setting is very different. I mean her settings tend to be domestic settings or Arcadian settings in which they are already populated almost exclusively by women. And this is this is a trend that will carry on and develop even further during her later career. I should have just said actually that that painting was shown at the Salon des Andes Pendants which was really cementing her her role amongst the Cubist artists and also the second tier Cubist artists because Picasso and Braque were showing less at that time than people like Metsanger or Delonée or other artists. We did include one portrait that she did of a male, another one. This one here is of Paul Rosenberg. It also dates from 1913. Paul Rosenberg was a major dealer in Paris and he took her on in 1913 and to represent her. He didn't actually give her a show until 1921 and we will talk about why that happened further on. But I just want to draw your attention to the fact that as you can see he's represented she has represented Paul Rosenberg in a rather effeminate way. In fact I should say this portrait has never been shown before. Our understanding is that he didn't really like it that much but and it hasn't been shown so this is the first time that it has been exhibited which is a coup for us of course. And also because at this point from 1913 onwards she does she had done some group portraits earlier group portraits but from now on men tend to appear in single commission portraits. Very rarely do you see them in her in her other works. They tend to be exclusively images of women. So Laurence was also very interested in collaborating with other artists and she did this through her work in decorative projects. In 1912 a designer named Henri Marre had this idea to create this suite of model domestic interiors for the Salon d'Otton of that year. And this was supposed to be a way to show off the latest in modern French design. So he got 11 of his friends slash the top designers and artists of the time to do this with him. They designed a foyer and entrance, a facade, a foyer and entrance, and a bedroom and a living room. Laurence was one of the artists included in this project and for the living room she painted four oval heads of women that crowned full-length mirrors and these full-length mirrors were in the corners of the room here. Let me see if this works. Oh yeah. So you can see that they were in these kind of angled corners and the the idea was that you know this this room was a total environment. Henri Marre was designed the chest that you see on the left there and in the photo it's right here. So there's the chest there are the oval heads and then this painting here is a painting called Woman with a Fan by Jean Metzanger, another Cubist artist who is a friend of Laurence's. And I think well we think it's no surprise that Metzanger chose this painting to include in this room where he knew Laurence's work was because the woman with a fan was a figure that was very much related to Laurence. That was kind of her avatar, the woman with a fan. So we think it's kind of a nod to Laurence and herself. I just have to also bring always bring in the wallpaper here on the grave. So in this picture you can see that she she also designed the wallpaper but we were not able to find that particular wallpaper unfortunately but we did find another wallpaper that she had designed and that she had sold even to Gertrude Stein for her house and we in our mock-up and you'll see in the exhibition we decided to include this other wallpaper and I really recommend you look at it. It's got little monkeys on it. I covered it for my own house I'm afraid but anyhow there you go it's not it's in the exhibition but do look at it because it's part of this idea that she also was working in other media and she was even doing wallpaper. Yeah so that wallpaper that she designed that we did reproduce for the exhibition was displayed at the Salon d'Otonne in 1912. It just wasn't in here it was like in a separate space. But oh and we should thank the Musee des Arts de Gratis for giving us the file and the permission to do that. Another project she did for interiors was for a private domestic interior. This is a folding screen that she designed for her friend and former lover Nicole. Nicole was married to a designer named André Groul who actually Lawrence and designed the wallpaper for that was in that other space in the Salon d'Otonne. So they were a very you know tight knit intimate group of people. But Lawrence this this folding screen was based on a folding screen that she had designed for the theater. So she had done a set design for the Comedie Francaise for a play called A Croix Rèves les Jeunis and she basically redid this folding screen or screen like it to to be displayed in Nicole's house. Also in Nicole's house was this oval portrait that André and Nicole had commissioned from Lawrence Saint and André actually designed that oval silver frame. So you can imagine these two together in the Groul's house in Paris. They had a very glitzy life. They entertained a lot and we you know this this folding screen was kind of the perfect backdrop to their lives. Just also a little detail about the folding screen it when you see it in the exhibition it is no longer assembled as a folding screen. It is now four separate panels so that's kind of why we have it the way we have it where you you can't actually see it as a folding screen anymore. But apparently what happened later on in Nicole's life is that she dismantled the folding screen and hung the whole all four panels over her bed. And just I am going to mention on the side you'll see that many of the great works we have in the exhibition come from the Musée Laurent Saint in Tokyo. There is the biggest collection of Laurent Saint's works are actually held in Japan. And we have been very lucky and we're very grateful to the owner of the museum and the collection for lending us so many important works because quite frankly without them one can't really do her justice and do as an important exhibitionist. We'd like to think we have we have done here. Now Laurent Saint's life takes a bit of a turn when she splits up eventually with Apollinaire in 1913. She takes on another lover about a year later a young youngish German artist who was working in Paris who happened to be a Baron, Baron Otto van Vakten, not a super successful artist and certainly not anywhere near as successful as her but they got together and they marry in June 1914. Now at the time when you married a German after a month you became automatically a German national and unfortunately in August 1914 as you know the war breaks out and they find themselves on honeymoon in the north of France and decide that for their safety they should leave France and they go to Spain precisely to Madrid originally. Now she finds herself kind of catapulted out of this Parisian avant-garde of all her friends of her milieu and she finds herself in Spain with this new husband completely disorientated, tries to integrate herself slightly through Spanish society, through some Spanish ladies who she meets but she's she's very divorced from what's going on in Paris and you really feel it if you read her letters to her friend Henri-Pierre Rocher there's this real sense of her being scared of being left out. I mean she had FOMO I guess one would call it now that she would have been left out of what was going on and she felt isolated. She did go to the Prado and she looked at a lot of historical Spanish painting she was particularly taken by early Goya which she saw there, his early pastoral works but she she was isolated and here is also when she's starting to think of who she is as an artist and it's interesting that away from the epicenter of the art world which was still Paris she really develops her own style and in a certain sense she becomes the Marie-Laurentin that we mostly recognize today in her works that's okay this this is a little work it's a small work I recommend you you look at it's very very um I don't know probably about I don't know how it is an inches five by ten inches or something small piece but I think it conveys with this pink curtain the pink curtain appears quite often in her paintings but here it's a chain mail pink curtain as if it's called the prisoner and one gets the sense that she feels that she's in a prison there in Spain and she's cut off from people it's also the time as Cindy was saying that she's writing a lot of poetry and in the exhibition you'll see alongside this painting a poem that she wrote which is really a very sad poem in which you really feel this kind of anguish that she's going through at the time in Spain I mean things weren't all as bleak as she perhaps portrayed however because Nicole did go and visit her in Spain and it is at that time that they really cemented their love affair and they write to each other they write poetry to each other and also when she's in Barcelona because she moves around a little bit in Spain when she's in Barcelona in 1916 she connects again with Francis Picabia who we met we mentioned sorry earlier who she'd met when she was a young student in Paris and Picabia had gone to Spain he'd come from New York where he'd been working beginning to work with Duchamp and the whole idea of the kind of Dada world was beginning to develop and he was making these mechanical portraits and we've decided rather like we did with the Metsanger to include this in the exhibition because I think it shows first of all her connections and how she was despite having a very different style of work connected to this whole group of very avant-garde artists even when she was in Spain but also to show how she collaborated with them because he at the time develops a magazine publishes a magazine called 391 which is based on the 291 of Alfred Stieglitz that had been published in New York previously and she contributes to the magazine with drawings and her poems and in this portrait that Picabia which we have from the Pompidou that Picabia does of her you see how he references her very specifically he talks about Portrait de Mérens Saint Four in Hand which apparently was a game they played at the casino together they had a brief love affair at this point too much to the dismay of his wife but that and then there's the reference to her dog Le Fidel Coco which went everywhere with her and then also Alain Bredin Bosch now Bosch was a way of saying German in a kind of rather slang way in Paris during the First World War and she was married to a German so he's making reference to to her husband and then she says il n'est pas donné à tout le monde d'aller à Barcelone which is a play on an ancient saying which means not everybody can go to Corinth is the original saying and it it probably means that not everybody has the joy of being in Barcelona with me Picabia being a a rather kind of formidable character so we wanted to show this connection that she had to this other world because it was very important the networks she makes and later we'll talk about the female networks but her networks all the way through her life from very early on she was much more involved than people have wanted to portray they've tended to see her as a minor figure but actually she knew everybody and she was connecting and writing and putting people together and I mean you think of between Napoleon and Picasso and then Paul Rosenberg and Rosé I mean she just knew all the main players and she knew them well and they were supporting her all the time but she does at that in those years in Spain and then in Germany and Switzerland before she returns to Paris in 1921 it's at that point that she really develops this signature style these paintings with blues and pinks and grays and these kind of diaphanous women who were kind of floating in a kind of space they don't seem to be fixed on the ground it's interesting of course that she will be involved with the ballet which we'll talk about in a minute but it's in her years in exile that she really becomes Marie-Laurent Saint that we recognize and I should just point out that you'll see that she always signs she's always known as Marie-Laurent Saint she signs with both names because she wants you to be sure that she's a woman if you just put Laurent Saint you wouldn't necessarily be sure but having Marie-Laurent Saint makes it very clear that she's a female artist so Laurent Saint returns to Paris in 1921 she divorces Otto she becomes French again and she has a major show at Paul Rosenberg's gallery a major solo show this 1921 Rosenberg show launches her career everyone comes to see it it's critically acclaimed it's really the start of you know the her popularity in the height of her career and she gets a lot of different opportunities that come from all these people coming to see her show one of them is that the director of the Ballet Rousse Serge Diaghilev commissions her to design a new production for the for the Ballet Rousse called Les Biches and she is paired with Poulenc who does the music and Nuginska who does the choreography so the whole concept of the ballet actually is derived from Laurent Saint's aesthetic world I mean she is central to the the scenario and the aesthetic and everything about Les Biches unlike in the Maison Cubiste where it was really that was André Mal's vision and she was collaborating and collaborating with him and and contributing to that as an emerging artist but by the early 20s she is and you know a well-known artist in her own right and it's her aesthetic that is driving the project and Poulenc at this time is a very young kind of hot shot composer but still quite young so the the production is called Les Biches which in French means the dose literally but it is a slang term for lesbian and it's a it's also a slang term for a kept young woman so Laurent Saint designs this whole world that intertwines all of these concepts you can see on the left the stage curtain that she designs and then on the right you can see in this archival photo the set that she designs as well as costumes so the two type or characters that we wanted to pull out and emphasize in our exhibition are the main character who is called the Gerson in the blue tunic in short shorts this character was an androgynous one for Gerson in French means boy and then to add the Ne the Gerson would be to feminize the boy so this was you know an intersex androgynous character who was at the center of the Amherst pursuits in the ballet I should mention that the ballet didn't really have a particular plot it was much more evocative the scenario was basically a bunch of young people in a villa probably in the south of France having a huge party and a lot of romantic intrigue so the Galson was at the center of all of this romantic intrigue the characters that you see drawn out on the left were called the girls in gray and they were a lesbian couple that come in at the end of the ballet and ignore all the men so this was a queer production right this was a queer ballet that was designed by Laurent Saint and with music by Poulenc who is gay it was very much an expression of their their world and their aesthetic in the exhibition we have reconstructed these costumes we commissioned the costume conservator Cathy Coho to re-create the tunic and short shorts for the Galson and the gray dresses for the girls because the original costumes from 1924 are not in exhibitable condition so it's she did an amazing job I hope you enjoy it and the last actually I'm gonna make a little plug also because we you know we were just so interested in this ballet that we decided to commission headlong dance theater a local dance company to create a dance piece inspired by Le Biche and by the fluid kind of gender and queer themes and the female animal landscape of this ballet they will be there will be a slate of performances in the fall and in January of this new commissioned piece from headlong so look out for that one thing again I'll add is that there is in the exhibition a little clip of a production that was done in Rome in 2008 of Le Biche so you can really see the dance taking part so it's it's actually very beautiful and I hope you enjoy it so the next room we have in our exhibition is a room all about women supporting women and there's this point in the 1920s La Hensein seems to have been abandoned the male connections that she had so much and really she is part of a whole group of women who are working in Paris including writers like the American Natalie Clifford Barney like Nancy Cunard the the heiress and collector they're all part of the circle of women who are having salons together and exchanging ideas together and she becomes like the very fashionable portraitists for these women and we have a selection of these portraits that she did in the 1920s here is one of Madame Paul Guillaume now maybe you know because Paul Guillaume was a dealer French dealer he was very influential on Dr Vance and helped him to buy several works he didn't help him to buy his Laurent Sainz well he may have been directly but they didn't come directly through hit through his gallery but Domenica Guillaume who is portrayed here she was actually a very forceful character and she I did a lecture here a while ago in which I talked about her but she was somebody who really had a great influence on her husband and on her second husband and eventually her collection does get sold to the Musée de l'Ancherie in Paris and you can see it today this painting she's represented in this rather muted pinks and rows rather different to her character and we're unclear what she thought about it but the painting today is in the collection of the l'Ancherie in Paris here's another perhaps more famous person that she painted Coco Chanel now famously when she did paint this work Coco said I don't like it redo it and Laurent Sainz apparently said to her but you're just some country girl from the Auvergne who are you to tell me how to paint a portrait no no you have to accept it exactly as it is and apparently she did but anyhow the other thing that the thing that I to notice is the animals also appear with these women it always seems to be an animal and kind of a fantastical animal it's unclear I mean it probably is a dog but sometimes it's impossible to tell exactly what kind of animal it is and then one more I think yes here is another famous person from the period Helena Rubenstein the cosmetics magnet who she Taikun Taikun Taikun who she painted apparently Rubenstein liked this portrait it made her look young and beautiful and she was neither of the two at the time so she was very happy very happy to have this portrait painted of her but what we wanted to show in this room was really the the networks that the people she was painting the way she she was really very famous at this time and if you were any any any woman you wanted to have your portrait painted by Nachilo Hansen so in the last section of the exhibition we really explore this concept of sapphic modernity the word sapphic comes from the ancient Greek poet Sappho who was famous for her erotic lesbian love poetry and during the 19th and 20th century in the UK and in Europe the term sapphic came to you know be the term that the queer lesbian kind of community referred to itself with so hence the title sapphic Paris we wanted to be very accurate to the period and Laurence was interested in sapphic themes throughout her career and we wanted to show the longevity of this interest by pairing the earliest work and the latest work in the exhibition around sapphic themes so on the left you see a print called the song of bilitis from 1904 right she's still an art student at this point but she does this print of bilitis who is a fictional Greek poet who is a lover of sappho so you can see from you know from the first time that she's really like delving into art she is looking at these themes and then on the right you see a new french translation it was new at the time of the poems of sappho and Laurence was the one who was commissioned to illustrate this book Laurence's interest as well as her entree into the sapphic world was very much through Natalie Clifford Barney who Sim already mentioned but I just wanted to you know shout her out again in this context Barney had a famous kind of sapphic salon that she held before the war and after the war for many many decades and Laurence was one of you know the the people who were was in attendance at these salons frequently for many years and Barney and Laurence were very close throughout their lives we have correspondence between them through the 1950s and Barney was also who Laurence was writing to when she was working on these illustrations for the poems of sappho she was always keeping Barney updated on how they were going one of the works in this section that we're very excited to have one of the real key works in the show is the woman with a dove this is a double portrait of Laurence who's there in the front in the gray suit in the black tie and behind her is Nicole you know who was her lover at this time who's wearing you know a feathered boa and the green dress and it's a very sweet and tender portrait that speaks to the intimacy and the love that they had between each other very subtle you can see that Laurence was wearing like a pink bow around her waist which you can see as kind of a a reference or like a displacement of Nicole's arms wrapping around her so instead of Nicole wrapping her arms around the waist you have the pink bow there is a white dove that's perched on a book or a letter that Laurence is holding the white dove was a symbol of their love and desire for each other Nicole wrote a poem to Marie that makes this very clear and when you are in the exhibition again we have this digital platform called Barn's Focus which where we could put this kind of extra content if you scan the painting it will pull up this love poem that Nicole wrote to Marie that you know talks about the dove so Laurence's sapphic world often included performers she painted a lot of acrobats and ballerinas and all these kinds of women who perform in these you know spaces here we have right this woman in the pink tutu and then this other woman with this long kind of blue tunic that well you probably will will see that it recalls the costume for the gale sun in the beach right actually there's a there's a fun story about you know related to this which was that Laurence has original design for that costume was the blue tunic at the long train but apparently she was like you know coming to bother the costume designer the entire time she was working on the costume and at one point she said you can just just cut off the train and just you know it just felt better just felt more right so so that's how that kind of tunic ended up so short and then the the ballerina has these short shorts and and the ballerina was playing the character said she feels so naked you know and this is just like this little tunic and short shorts so Diago have said well why don't you just put on a pair of white gloves and that I don't know that that was that in any case this going back to the sir the painting this is so typical of laurence's world of the the pink woman and the blue woman intertwined with all of these animals just to point them out because sometimes they're hard to see this is a horse right that wraps all the way around this kind of totally boneless horse that's hugging them you know here's this dog there's a deer or something like that something probably a deer back here and then here are children who are spectating and we end with this gorgeous work which is one of my favorites it's so clever to me because what it is is laurence and redoing french tradition this painting is based on an 18th century type of french genre painting called the fête galante which is associated with the Rococo painter Jean-Antoine Watteau and the fête galante was a type of painting that that represented aristocratic men and women in garden settings you know flirting and courting each other and so what laurence has done to update this painting for the sapphic the modern sapphic world is to excise all the men and instead you have women in this forest setting intertwined with animals kind of flirting and being you know having this kind of romantic intrigue you see different attributes of love for example the the violin here the fan and then of course again so intimately intertwined with the animals and going through this you know parted pink curtain um the last comment i want to make about sapphic modernity is that it is really it is really laurence's legacy i think this is what makes her a you know an artist of lasting importance is that she created and envisioned this alternate world this alternate aesthetic of modernism which was kind of like this parallel universe it was almost utopian in a way it was kind of radically utopian in envisioning a new way of being one speculation or interpretation that you can have about laurence and all of her animals in these paintings is that it was part of this alternate universe where the boundaries and categories that you find in reality are dissolved right categories of gender categories of sexuality and even the category of human and animal closing this is just us giving a shout out to our own catalog we that was one of the paintings which we were able to get we were so happy that we put on our cover i really would like to also thank all our co-authors who are not here with us today but there really are some very good texts in the in the catalog which i recommend you read but certainly chris podges talks about the relationship to cubism there's a very good essay by rachel silvery which looks delves into this sapphic queer world that laurence and created and we have also incredibly new scholarship by a young french researcher called orianne paurel and also our colleague corrine chang who i don't know whether she's still here corrine thank you she did a lot of research on all the female sitters who are included in our exhibition and also other ones that she painted i just want to also say one tiny little thing we try to recreate in our design of the exhibition in our use of the colors this this alternate world that cindy has been referring to and it'd be interesting to see what you think about it the our color scheme is very different to what we normally have in exhibitions and our whole aesthetic we wanted to really delve into this even from the point of view the way we presented her work and i hope i hope that you will appreciate it and thank you all very much for coming today and i'm not sure we do have time probably for some questions is that right yes we do have time for questions well first of all please thank you moneta so wonderful and what a treat so this is our special mike cindy can we practice the show folks what you can actually do we call it the catch box and it works and it works so my phone may not work but this works so does anyone have any questions here and there's at least one question online yes okay i don't trust my arm i'm gonna bring it over to you wow all right eagles here i come i was oh it's good show um curious about why her museum ended up in tokyo the musea de moe lance on um why it's in tokyo well there is this one collector um whose name would you like to do you can say this because you can do it mr takano yoshizawa that's full name that's right he collected he started collecting in the 1970s uh i'll tell you a funny story because we his son one of his sons was here and who's he he has now died and his he had four sons who inherited this collection and it's the youngest son who really looks after it and we did ask him we said why did your father buy so many works by loran saint and uh he told us this rather charming story how he is the youngest of four sons and his parents always wanted a daughter and they they used to laugh in his family saying that that's why he bought so many loransans because they had it was this very female world but i he he started buying in the 70s and by the mid 80s he had already opened his museum he has over i would say a hundred major paintings and about 500 works on paper so it really is the biggest collection in the world thank you was laura sin during her lifetime exhibiting in mainstream type museums or were they more like boutique painted bride type places well she was exhibiting in galleries and in major exhibitions so she was exhibiting at you know that as we were mentioning the salando done the salandes and a pendant these were the major kind of venues for contemporary artists to exhibit she was with all of the major cubist painters so the sexy she exhibited the section door which was the largest exhibition of cubist work um at the time with all of the major artists so she was also exhibiting internationally actually to go back to the japan question she did exhibit in tokyo in 1914 she exhibited at the modern gallery in new york in 1917 she was in the armory show that went to new york boston and chicago so she was kind of exhibiting in all the major venues but they were not you know they were they were not in museums yet that would come later hi i'm curious because the sapphic world was such an undercover world she was selected to designed for the ballet which was really no theme on the play itself it was just like you said group of people having parties and things like that if she was trying to say something because of the players the director of the music you said that jinsko was involved with that was that a just like we're here kind of thing well i think one thing that sim and i have been discovering are really just interested in is just how open paris was you know what is open society it was in the 1920s and that actually this this whole world and and labiche in particular was seen as emblematic of 1920s paris of a certain culture a certain subculture that it wasn't undercover in a way wasn't you know out there it was just like here's the fun loving hedonistic roaring 20s you know it it definitely captured a certain spirit and a certain moment and it was incredibly successful it's very popular ballet then also one thing regarding her paintings is that she has this way of appealing to very broad audiences she appealed to the male audiences i mean people like barns people like john quinn they bought her works because of what i went there was several she had a she had a following amongst the male buyers but she was also speaking in a coded way to this lesbian community of which she was part of they would recognize things that perhaps the male buyers would not recognize they would just see oh pretty ladies together you know and they would not perhaps think of them quite in the same way certainly dr barns probably wasn't thinking about the sapphic world when he was buying them so i think that there is that she was very clever she was very adept and she was i always make this rather light-hearted thing but i think she would have been a great instagrammer because she would have been very good at presenting herself and she knew exactly what would sell she knew exactly how to how to um work in all these different media and she was doing something that many other women did at the time and sonia delane is another one who i always mentioned who was able to work you know it was book illustration whether she was doing the ballet whether she was doing wallpaper whether she was doing her painting she was she was using all these different ways to get her work known which was you know more common for women than it was for men men to just be the painter so there are three questions here so i see you first you and like the greenish yes sir and then you um next um but i have two on line um so the first one is was there any artistic dialogue between marie lonson and florina stettheimer good question they they are so similar um absolutely we were struck by that from the beginning about how what a parallel they are to each other florina stettheimer in the u.s and marie lonson in paris but we haven't found any like personal connection between them i mean you know by six they're less than six degrees separated right because florina stettheimer was hanging out with the douchamps and then um lonson was hanging out with douchamps friends so certainly they would have been you know connected through friends or friends or friends but they were not friendly themselves or really talking to each other as far as we can tell and then the second question online and then i'm coming to you next is oh wait where is it did she have any contact with franz mark wondering because of her emphasis on animals well she did show in germany yeah i mean that that is another speculation that people have and actually i should have if we go back to the women in the forest let me just go back to that if i can no here um so 1920 she's in dusseldorf at this point she's staying at her husband's family's estate which is right near these kinds of forests so like the the german forest essentially and this is part of what creates the setting in this palette for her she's really fascinated by the german forest at this point and it you know people speculate that she was starting to look at franz mark while she was in germany um i don't think that we have i don't know do we have a definitive answer for that no no but she does show in germany isn't she prior to the first world war yes because in 1913 she has a double contract actually with paul rozenberg in paris and then fleck time in berlin and so she is also showing in in berlin and in germany i recognized the earlier photos that you showed of the paintings that the expressions were blank it's almost like i got the sense that she felt that she didn't have a voice and i saw the same expression in the painting called the prisoner um as though she was again she didn't have a voice i don't know if that's meaningful at all but i saw an expression of that in her in her the facial expressions and also the second question there's this new museum in washington of all female female art do you think that they have incorporated any of her work down in that museum well i can answer the second bit very easily she there is a painting by her in that museum uh we'd actually wanted to borrow it but because they were reopening their galleries we were not able to to the first part of the question i mean she she is looking at those early um goya's where the women have these kind of rounded faces and black eyes quite expressionless but it's happening before i don't know if cindy if you have any i don't think we haven't come across anything that specifically says that but i there may be a speculation that one could yeah one can read into it i mean the way i read the expressions are that it is not about the face and the emotion that the face is very purposefully stylized and that the expression of the painting really comes through form right it comes through color it comes through shape and this is you know part of what the avant-garde were doing at the time you can even look at saizan's portraits of his wife madame saizan um you know the idea there is that the the expressiveness of that painting is through color and form rather than you know in in the face beyond the galleries and salons i'd be interested to know when the first major museums started to acquire and display her work i think it's post yeah probably after her death well there's 1936 there's that one painting there's a one painting that the the french state acquires in 1936 i'm not sure of exhibitions i don't think they come till after her death and quite late on um because yes she she she was very um protective of her writings and of of her persona and the way and when she dies everything gets kind of shut away in the do say library and it's quite difficult to access her writings and it's really not until the 70s that you start there are there are some uh french art historians who begin to work on her in the 1970s and more recently there have been quite a few feminist art historians who've been looking her but and there's been there was a show in America 30 years ago but in terms of french museums i think it was post-war so we're down to our last two questions one online and one here so as someone online asks why is the museum of laurence and it just moved quickly sorry why is the museum of laurence and in tokyo closed is it temporary you don't know exactly um it closed a few years ago that having said that the collection does travel quite a lot uh the um they send their paintings around they're very very generous lenders so even though the museum itself is closed at the moment you will probably see a lot of her works there's been shows in japan and to my knowledge this is the first time he lends such a big group to america but so even though the museum itself is closed there are opportunities to see the works in various exhibitions um i was wondering if there were people very much influenced by her immediately afterwards um because she has such a a particular vision and also if she in influenced the fashion world and because sonia deloni's drawings are really quite similar to some of these and uh she's i mean she's an artist but um whether the various fashion designers of the time was she in key with that well she said it was because nicole was actually the sister of paul poire so she was very much involved i mean and she did actually design some dresses yeah yeah we couldn't um it's very hard to find extent examples but laurence did design a fabric that was then used in dresses um by nicole um she also you know had a dialogue with paul poire and may have been a bit of a muse to him and then there was a whole show this year earlier this year in japan that was called um it was basically on laurence and fashion and chanel because laurence and chanel were i mean there was that debacle with the portrait but they they were still kind of friends and you know they were designing for the ballet ruse at the same time and laurence was wearing and buying chanel a lot and so there there was definitely a relationship between laurence and chanel um and uh i did not see the exhibition in japan but i'm sure there was a lot more um research that came out about laurence's kind of influence in in fashion so we are at time however i'm gonna take a little privilege to give you another opportunity sendy to queue up what's coming by way of dance because the last question as online was or is uh when is the ballet and then two will the redesigned costumes be worn no the the costumes are staying in the exhibition so that you can all see them there um but the headlong dance theater is going to have um open rehearsals in november and december i think novem i i don't have the dates totally in my head i think it's november 18th and december 15th something like that we will have them up on the website if we don't already um but they are going to have open rehearsals so the public is invited to come and be part of the choreographic process they are um looking to do a piece that starts with three dancers in doing three solo studies in different parts of the building including one dancer in the in the exhibition and then these three dancers will come together for a culminating trio in the light court in the annenberg court right outside the roberts gallery um so that's what you have to look forward to in the final performance so there'll be two open rehearsals and then the final performance will be january 18th i believe um and the performance will be preceded by a panel discussion with the choreographers the costume designer um and well i will be moderating yes awesome and with that please once again thanks you