Soutine / de Kooning: Conversations in Paint Exhibition
Exhibition identity, exhibition graphics, environmental color, print"The Soutines had a glow that came from within the paintings," Willem de Kooning said, "it was another kind of light." In 1952, de Kooning visited the Barnes Foundation Museum with his wife Elaine to stand in front of the sixteen Soutines in the permanent collection, a visit that would prove pivotal to his celebrated Woman series. The conversation runs only in one direction, Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943) died before de Kooning became well known, never knowing the generation of American painters he would help set loose. Soutine / de Kooning: Conversations in Paint, organized jointly by the Barnes Foundation Museum and the Musées d'Orsay et de l'Orangerie, Paris, and presented in its world premiere and only US showing from March through August 2021, made that asymmetrical conversation visible: nearly 45 works in dialogue across time, tracing the transmission of built-up surfaces, restless brushwork, and the oscillation between the figurative and the abstract.
With co-curator Claire Bernardi, chief curator of paintings at the Musée d'Orsay, unable to travel from France during the pandemic, I served as her on-site eyes and hands, working with her remotely on the physical environment of the show. The exhibition unfolds in two distinct environments, the first half washed in a warm rosy cream that holds its warmth against vivid, loaded canvases without competing with them, the second shifting into a deep prune, rich and somber, complementing and intensifying the works it holds. In the branding and print materials, acidic and forest greens offer a refreshing counterpoint, nodding to the strangeness and fertility of this particular pairing. The typographic identity carries the exhibition's central conceit directly into the design: Sometimes Times, a delicate serif, and Untitled Sans, a no-nonsense grotesque, are interspersed throughout exhibition titles and wall panel headers, their visual conversation echoing the dialogue between the works. The slash of the title, that small typographic hinge between two names, was worked into the main text panel at the same angle, a quiet structural note that runs through the whole.
+ Type: Sometimes Times by Boulevard Lab and Untitled Sans by Klim Type Foundry
+ Art Direction: Olivia Verdugo
+ Graphic Design: Olivia Verdugo and Pauline Nyren
+ Photography: Alexander Rotundo and Colleen Hankerson
© 2026 Olivia S Verdugo