Just when we thought we knew the landscape of French art in the first quarter of the 20th century, Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris, co-curated by Simonetta Fraquelli and Cindy Kang, shakes up the narrative with a fresh exhibition of a major Parisian painter largely neglected by art history. A bisexual woman (already two reasons for her prior invisibility in that now dated story), Laurencin (1883–1956) carefully crafted a “feminine” aesthetic into a significant body of work that was ahead of its time.
Some people may not like the phallocentric persona of Picasso but he did effectively change the course of western art and, in the process, changed the way in which we see the world.