She regards the viewer aslant, her figures covering her mouth, partially obscuring her expression. At about this time, the Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff declared that the lips never lie. Cloaked in bright colors, a Symbolist self-portrait of the artist as enigma.

"I like what is wild (sauvage) in a garden."

For Burnat-Provins, the world turned upside down in 1907 when she met and fell in love with Paul de Kalbermatten, an attractive young engineer. Le Livre pour Toi, published that same year, is the first of a series of passionate books about love; it begins with this epigraph: "A great love is a masterpiece."

In her work now, Burnat-Provins revisits her interest in japonisme. Look at the book's cover: the asymmetrical arrangement of the design elements, the single bindweed blossom, and the use of space as an active element of design are deceptively austere, yet manage to convey intense feeling.
In Dream For You (c. 1911) again there is a meeting of l'Art Nouveau and l'Art Orientale in the flowering curvilinear lines wrapping the text in a broad decorative border on the flat white page, yet suggests significance in the reflected landscape at bottom.
Marguerite divorced Adolph Burnat and moved to Savoie with Paul in 1908. The next year she underwent surgery that left her unable to have children. The couple married in London in 1910, then moved to Alexandria, Egypt for two years. While her husband pursued various engineering projects, Marguerite visited the Pyramids and the couple made sight-seeing trips to Lebanon and Syria before returning to France in 1912.
The outbreak of war in 1914 turned their shared world upside down: Paul was drafted into the army and Marguerite, left alone with anxieties for her husband's safety, began to experience tormenting hallucinations. These disturbing visions would recur for years, leading her to consult a psychoanalyst in 1916. Burnat-Provins the artist incorporated these images into her work through a series she called Ma Ville (My City).
The paintings are peopled with beings she called "des etres qui s'imposent" (beings who force themselves on me). She wrote of them, "I endure them, cringe as I feel them coming and simply cannot help drawing them." Unlike the characters she created under the symbolist influence, these creatures confront us open-eyed, faces shaped by expressions that convey fathomless distress. Animals appear, hovering around the humans, perhaps real, perhaps ghostly manifestations of the extreme emotions that can push humans to confront their primordial roots. Birds that hover like vultures appear as ambiguous companions.
In Les Etres d'Albimes they cluster, stare and multiply. But in Anthor et L'Osieau Noir (1922) the bird appears to have fused with the woman it envelopes; here is no protective embrace. Frilute le Peureux (1915) shows a face transfixed by fear, the eyes almost impossible to describe as they hold us transfixed, trying to imagine what terror they aprehend. Some critics have looked at these pictures and concluded that they belong to the style of Art Brut, a movement notably associated with naivete, roughness, and at its extreme, the channeling of insanity. This notion does an injustice to Burnat-Provins' sophisticated, questing mind at work. It misses both the variety of her work and the centrality of women as subjects in her art. It is for these works that you will find Burnat-Provins is included in Collectioin de l'Art Brut of Lausanne, Switzerland. (Visit http://www.artbrut.ch/ )

Note: A fascinating study in French is Marguerite Burnat Provins: De L'Art Nouveau a l'art hallucinatoire by Helen Bieri, published by Somogy, Paris. For information about the Association des Amis de Marguerite Burnat-Provins, visit http://www.cultureactif.ch/associations/mpb.htm

Images: 1. Self-portrait, c. 1900, Bibliotheque Cantonale, Lausanne. 2. A la tour de Peltz, 1904, photograph of Maguerite Burnat Provins, Collection de l' Art Brut, Lausanne, Switzerland. 3. Dream for You, c. 1911, Vevey. 4. Le Livre pour Toi, 1907, Vevey. 5. Les Etres d'Abime, 1921, Collection de l'Art-Brut, Lausanne. 6. Anthor et l'Oiseau Noir, 1922, Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne. 7. Frilute the Fearful, 1915 Collection de l'Art Brut, Lausanne.