Dawn (after El Lissitzky) is a work shaped by Larsen’s experience teaching graduate seminars on Paul Cézanne during the late 1960s as a professor at the University of South Florida, when she was the only woman on an art faculty in the state. She notes in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Cézanne was—not visually, but conceptually—probably the most important artist in my own history. What Cézanne said was that he wanted to ‘make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of museums.’ For him it wasn’t about optical seeing; it was about taking the world apart and putting it back together in a parallel structure or way.” The block-based solidity that defines the figures in this planar composition echoes the methodically-constructed approach to perspective that undergirds the work of the French Impressionist master. The unfolding of form across slanting, diagonal axes suggest the central presence of another critical influence: the non-objective abstractions of El Lissitsky. Larsen brings the same structural kineticism to Dawn. This painting uses Proun 30T (1920) by Lissitsky as a springboard to build out geometric structure into a psychological ordering of space that reveals itself to Larsen as representational form. In this instance, Dawn depicts two figures tenuously balanced upon slender beams, as the sun rises amid a landscape punctuated by stone-hued buildings.