Marie Laurencin

Print of a Young Woman (left) and Original etching from Alternance (right), by Marie Laurencin. 

Marie Laurencin was one of few women artists of the early 20th century to experiment with Cubist ideas, although her work does not reach the height of abstraction attained by her contemporaries, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Instead, her focus is on the feminine: the subjects of her work are most often young women depicted in soft, pastel colors. The femininity of her work is often viewed as a response to Cubism's masculine modernism.