Previously Unknown Podcast Episode 2: On Marie Laurencin - Features

Text

Previously Unknown is a podcast from Independent 20th Century that reframes and reevaluates what we think we know about contemporary art.

In this episode, Julia Halperin speaks with artist Maureen Dougherty, and Cindy Kang and Simonetta Fraquelli, co-curators of Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris (October 22, 2023 –January 21, 2024) at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the first major US exhibition dedicated to French artist Marie Laurencin in over 30 years. Our guests will speak to Marie Laurencin’s unique contributions to modern art in conjunction with Nahmad Contemporary’s solo presentation of her paintings from the 1920s and 1930s at Independent 20th Century. This body of work illuminates Laurencin’s distinct artistic language within the male-dominated avant-garde circles of early 20th-century Paris.

This podcast is generously sponsored by Crozier Fine Arts.

Text-Image-1

Previously Unknown Podcast Episode 2: On Marie Laurencin - Features - Independent Art Fair

Julia Halperin is an arts and culture journalist, editor, and cofounder of the Burns Halperin Report, the largest report of its kind tracking equity and representation in the art world. Her writing has appeared in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Financial Times. From 2017 to 2022, she was executive editor of Artnet News. Before that, she served as museums editor of The Art Newspaper and news editor of Art + Auction magazine.

Simonetta Fraquelli, an independent curator specializing in early 20th-century European art, is consultant curator for the Barnes Foundation. Fraquelli began her career at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, where she worked for over 20 years on a range of exhibitions. Since 2006, she has collaborated with several leading European and American museums. In 2017, she co-curated one of the largest exhibitions of Modigliani’s work, Modigliani at Tate, London (with Nancy Ireson); at the Barnes, she co-curated Soutine / de Kooning: Conversations in Paint (2021) and Modigliani Up Close (2022). Fraquelli has published on many additional artists including Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, and Gino Severini. She holds advanced degrees from the Courtauld Institute, London.

Cindy Kang is curator at the Barnes Foundation. Her research and publications have focused on the relationship between painting and decorative arts in late 19th- and early 20th-century France. She curated Marie Cuttoli: The Modern Thread from Miró to Man Ray (2020) at the Barnes and served as managing curator for the Barnes presentations of Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist (2018–19) and Renoir: Father and Son/Painting and Cinema (2018). Kang commissioned the 2022 Barnes exhibition Water, Wind, Breath: Southwest Native Art in Community and co-led the institution’s land acknowledgment process. She previously held curatorial and research positions at the Bard Graduate Center, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Frick Collection, and was a scholar-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute. She received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Maureen Dougherty studied painting at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, and at the New York Studio School. The legacy of modernist figuration, from Henri Matisse, Marie Laurencin, and Kees van Dongen to Walt Kuhn and Alex Katz, simmers beneath the surface of her work, yet her paintings possess a 21st-century touch and aura completely their own. With her parallel practice as a filmmaker exploring the social and political currents of the day, coupled with her upbringing in Schenectady, New York, a territory occupied by the Mohawk Nation for more than 1000 years before it was settled by the Dutch in 1661, she is invariably aware of art’s role both inside and outside history’s continuum. Her exhibitions include Borrowed Time, 2023, Cheim & Read, a group show Some People at Cheim & Read and a solo show at Mark Borghi in Sag Harbor, Maureen Dougherty: What Are You Looking At?, 2022. As a documentary filmmaker, Dougherty has a decades-long collaboration with two-time academy award winning doc pioneer Barbara Kopple. Dougherty lives in Chelsea and maintains a studio in the lower east side.