Lipstick

Artist Dame Laura Knight (English, 1877 - 1970)

Date1925

MediumEtching with engraving

DimensionsPlate: 9 3/4 × 7 13/16 inches (24.77 × 19.86 cm)

Credit LineBequest of Frances M. Logan

Object number53-51/66

On View

Not on view

Collections

Prints

Terms

Exhibition History

Color and Line: Masterworks on Paper, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, May 5-November 11, 2007; February 26-August 10, 2014; February 23-July 30, 2017, no cat.

Gallery Label

The raven-haired woman seen here, outlined in profile, is Anna Pavlova, the world-famous prima ballerina of the Imperial Russian Ballet and of Serge Diaghilev’s avant-garde Ballets Russes. Laura Knight, Dame Commander of the British Empire and only the second woman ever elected to the British Academy, captures Pavlova backstage as she applies lipstick. The dark folds of Pavlova’s gown are alive with motion, while the forms of boxes, combs and jars on her dressing table are defined by static contour lines. Our focus is on Pavlova, while she focuses on her ref lection in the mirror, which we cannot see.

Provenance

Frances M. Logan (1855-1946), Kansas City, MO, by 1946;

Bequeathed by Frances M. Logan to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1953.

Published References

G. Fredric Bolling and Valerie A. Withington, The Graphic Work of Laura Knight: Including a Catalogue Raisonné of Her Prints (Aldershot, Hants, England: Scolar Press, 1993), no. 34, pp. 31, 37, 115, 142, (repro.), as Lipstick.

George L. McKenna, The Collections of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: Prints 1460-1995 (Kansas City, MO: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in association with The University of Washington Press, 1996), 284, (repro.), as Lipstick.

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