A List
4/7/03

RECEPTION HONORS SLU FINE ARTS PROFESSOR FOR NEW BOOK

CANTON - The Friends of Owen D. Young and Launders Libraries at 
St. Lawrence University will hold a reception to honor Professor 
of Fine Arts Elizabeth L. Kahn, for the publication of her 
recent book, Marie Laurencin: Une Femme Inadaptée in Feminist 
Histories (Ashgate Publishing Limited, United Kingdom). The event 
will be on Thursday, April 17, at 4 p.m. in Owen D. Young 
Library; Kahn will speak about the book at the reception, which 
is open to the public.
	Kahn's exploration of the life and art of Laurencin began 
as she conducted research for the 1986 Frank P. Piskor Lecture on 
campus, on the topic "Your Home Isn't Safe Anymore: The Cubist 
House and the French Decorative Arts of 1912." Laurencin was among 
the artists who created the cubist house. The publishers of her 
book state that, "Until now the substance of her art and the 
feminist issues that were entangled in her life have been narrowly 
examined or reduced by an author's chosen theoretical format; 
and the terms of her lesbian identity have been overlooked. In 
this case study of une femme inadaptée and an unfit feminist, 
Kahn re-situates Laurencin in the on-going feminist debates that 
enrich the disciplines of art history, women's studies and 
literary criticism."
	Whitney Chadwick, author of Women Artists and the 
Surrealist Movement, states, "Kahn's impressive and timely study 
rescues Marie Laurencin from the margins of modern art. She 
emerges here not just as the mysterious and beguiling woman who 
inspired the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and painted the members 
of Picasso's cubist circle, but as a complex, multifaceted 
pioneer: in her painting, her writing, and her radical sexuality."
	A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Kahn earned 
a master's degree from the University of Pittsburgh and the 
Ph.D. from UCLA. She joined the St. Lawrence faculty in 1978; 
in 2002, she was appointed to the L.M. Flint Chair in Fine 
Arts. Kahn also wrote the 1984 book The Neglected Majority: 
'Les Camofleurs,' Art History and World War I, as well as a 
chapter of the 1997 anthology Modernism, Gender and Culture: 
A Cultural Studies Approach. In 1987, she co-directed the 
St. Lawrence arts festival, on the topic "Art and the Vietnam 
Era: The Politics of Memory."

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