 Hi, I'm Cindy Kang, I'm Associate Curator at the Barnes Foundation, and in celebration of Women's History Month, I wanted to take a look at a French artist, Marie-Lan Saint, who was active in the first half of the 20th century, but she's not very well known, though she's getting more and more attention these days because she was actually much more complex than meets the eye. So, Lan Saint ran in the male-dominated circles of Cubist artists and modern writers in Paris. She was friends with Brock, with Picasso, with Frances Picabia, and for several years she was in a relationship with the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. But despite this group of friends, she generally didn't paint in a discernibly Cubist style. She instead developed her own signature style of elongated stylized forms and her signature motif of this willowy ethereal woman child who inhabited an almost exclusively female world, as you can see here. This painting at the Barnes, Woman with a Muff, shows a fashionably dressed woman. She has fur collar and fur cuffs, and she's holding a muff in one hand, and she's adjusting her pink ribboned hat with the other hand. And her elegant manner is very much accentuated through Lan Saint's use of elongated forms. Her neck, her fingers, her entire torso. And she is perhaps seated in a theater box, which is indicated by the parted curtain behind her. But she looks straight out at the viewer, coolly regarding us as if we are the spectacle. So Lan Saint was considered a quintessentially feminine artist of her time. So that was because she mostly painted women, and you can see how she painted these women to be ethereal also through her paint technique. So if we zoom in a little bit, you can see how thinly she laid the paint down on the canvas. There's a very thin ground layer, and these very almost transparent washes on top. So it gives this canvas, again, this very ethereal quality. And actually, if we can scroll up, if I can get to that corner, very interestingly here, you see that she's got her initials here. There's ML kind of in cursive here, and then ML again underneath. I'm not really sure what that's about, but that's definitely worth more investigation because she also, of course, signed it here on the lower left. So in any case, there's the subject of women, there's this very thin paint technique, and there's also her pastel palette, these blues and pinks that are very much related to 18th century French painting or Rococo art. And this era in French history is very much associated with the feminine, with patrons like Madame de Pompadour, with the decorative arts. And Lan Saint actually did begin her artistic training as a porcelain painter at Sevre, which was the location of the national manufacturing for ceramics. And then she moved on to flower painting. She trained in flower painting before she decided to go in a little bit of a different direction. And she enrolled at an independent art academy in Paris called the Académie Umbér in 1903. And that is where she met Brock. And that is where she began to fall in with these young modern artists of her time. So she fell in with this group of Cubist artists, and she worked on them or worked with them on a very ambitious project called the Maison Cubiste or the Cubist home, which was exhibited at the Autumn Salon in Paris in 1912. And to this model home in the Cubist style, she contributed four oval portraits of heads of young women that are very much like the Barnes painting that we're looking at. And they crowned full length mirrors in a model living room. So Lausse certainly provided an overtly feminine counterpart to her male Cubist friends. But she was actually far more complex as an artist and as a person than the quote unquote girl in the group painting like pink ribbons. First of all, she was in fact probably of mixed heritage. Her mother was apparently Creole, and her father who was not married to her mother was a French politician who paid for her schooling and her upbringing but was really not present in her daily life as a positive father figure. So I wonder how much of her experience as this participant and yet outsider of middle class society contributed to the way she created her own vision and her own path for herself in her art. And it was through her art that she created very much an alternate feminine universe, this kind of feminine space that was actually related to a whole sapphic, we call it or lesbian subculture that blossomed in 1920s Paris. So Lausse, who had both male and female lovers, was not only part of the male-dominated Cubist circles, but she was also part of this lesbian literary set that centered around the salon of writer Natalie Clifford Barney who was American expatriate who lived in Paris. So in any case, Lausse's work is very much ripe for new investigation, and I hope you will take a look at her here at the Barnes or elsewhere as we honor Women's History Month. So thank you and see you next time. I'm Tom Collins, Newbauer Family Executive Director of the Barnes Foundation. I hope you enjoyed Barnes Takeout. Subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art. Thanks for watching and for your support of the Barnes Foundation.