Marie Laurencin was a French painter. She was a seminal figure in the Section d'Or — the artistic society that spawned cubism — adding what many consider to be a uniquely queer, feminine aesthetic to the cubist style.
Though the Parisian art world was very much a boys club, Laurencin was talented and persistent enough that she successfully managed to exhibit at both the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d'Automne — annual exhibitions that shaped European art in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Laurencin had an illustrious love life, openly having relationships with men and women alike. She had a high-profile affair with Guillaume Apollinaire, the father of modern surrealism, married a German count, took a string of lovers of both sexes, and joined Gertrude Stein's salon filled with queer women creatives and befriending famous lesbian actress Natalie Clifford Barnard.
Around 1924, she started to achieve international recognition as a portraitist featured in Vanity Fair. During WWII, despite the dangers posed to her as an openly queer artist during the Nazi occupation, Laurencin refused to leave Paris for the duration of the war, even after she lost her home to a Nazi requisition. Fortunately, she survived the experience and was able to pick up where she'd left off.