Natalie Dupêcher

Position
Ph.D., 2021
Role
Modern
Bio/Description

Profile

Natalie Dupêcher is the Associate Curator of Modern Art at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. She co-curated Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition, the first-ever major transatlantic retrospective of this artist, co-organized by the Menil Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Kunstmuseum Bern. An expert on Surrealism, the avant-garde, and histories of abstraction, Natalie oversees the Menil’s Surrealism galleries, in addition to curating temporary exhibitions.

Natalie earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Art & Archaeology in 2021. In her dissertation, “Language, Body, World: The Art of Hans Bellmer,” supervised by Professor Brigid Doherty, Natalie considered Bellmer’s art and writings, arguing that he used both to explore and give form to his conviction that the body was structured like a language, amenable to disarticulation and reorganization. Her work at Princeton was supported by a Donald and Mary Hyde Academic-Year Fellowship, the Getty Research Institute, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). She also served as an Assistant Instructor in the Department of Art & Archaeology, a Graduate Fellow in the Program in European Cultural Studies, and a Graduate Fellow in the Princeton Writing Program.

In 2015–16, Natalie was the Museum Research Consortium Fellow in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she worked on the exhibition Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round so Our Thoughts Can Change Direction (2016–2017). As a freelance writer, she subsequently authored more than a dozen artist introductions on MoMA’s website, including entries on Eugène Atget, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Dorothea Lange, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Francis Picabia, and Andy Warhol, among others. She also contributed to the revised and expanded edition of MoMA Highlights (2019).

Natalie holds an M.A. from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art, and a B.A. from New York University.

Selected Publications

Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition, co-editor and contributor. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2021.

Review of Surrealism at Play, by Susan Laxton. CAA.Reviews, January 22, 2020.

Francis Picabia: Materials and Techniques, co-editor. Published digitally by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2017; mo.ma/picabia_conservation.

“‘Like Clocks’: Keeping Time and Tracing Space in Cy Twombly’s Morocco Paintings.” Oxford Art Journal 39, no. 1 (March 2016): 19-33.