About this work
*Between Poses* is a pastel on canvas, completed in 1910, measuring roughly 26 by 36 inches — a horizontal format that suits its subject: a nude figure caught in the private, unscripted interval between formal studio poses. The title does much of the compositional work. Rather than a monument or an ideal, what Barney gives us is a body at rest, unperformed and unguarded. Pastel, with its powdery, skin-close luminosity, was the medium Barney returned to again and again when depicting the figure, and here it allows the flesh tones to bloom from the canvas with an almost atmospheric warmth. The palette reads as intimate — the soft ochres and rose of the body set against quieter, cooler grounds — and the handling recalls her near-contemporary *Nude Against Screen* (1911), which similarly frames a nude with a sensuous, introspective quality rooted in her Symbolist approach.
By 1910, Barney was working at the height of her powers from her celebrated Studio House on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C. During her residence there, the house functioned as her home, her art studio, and the District's cultural center — elaborately decorated by Barney herself, it hosted theatrical productions, art exhibitions, and visiting avant-garde artists. The catalogue of her 1910 output is striking: pastels of the dancer Ruth St. Denis and a portrait titled *Christian* were both signed at Studio House that same year.
Her Paris salon years had brought her into regular contact with Symbolist painters Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, John White Alexander, and Edmond Aman-Jean, and her art had begun to show a Symbolist influence that by 1910 had fully settled into her figure work — not as allegory, but as mood. The nude as a subject also carried a particular charge for a woman artist of Barney's class and era; Washington society found it unseemly that a woman of wealth and social standing would paint at all, let alone engage the unclothed figure with this degree of directness.
The original is now held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. As a print, *Between Poses* earns its place in rooms that favor
