A List
2/17/03

SLU PROFESSOR'S BOOK EXAMINES FEMINIST HISTORY OF FRENCH ARTIST

CANTON - A new book by St. Lawrence University Professor 
of Fine Arts Elizabeth L. Kahn examines the life of Marie 
Laurencin, an influential French 20th-century artist 
defined by some as "an unfit feminist."
	Marie Laurencin: Une Femme Inadaptée in Feminist 
Histories has been published by Ashgate Publishing Limited, 
in the United Kingdom. 
	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 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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