Staring Back: On Picasso's DEMOISELLES d'AVIGNON

Catalogue of 2015 exhibit at the Fleming Museum. Picasso's major 1907 painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, created an uproar in the Paris art world and laid the foundation for the development of Cubism. The Fleming Museum's exhibition explored Picasso's extraordinary process in creating the painting, through innovative installations and advanced technologies that transformed the museum experience. The painting's ongoing legacy is examined through the work of a diverse group of American, African, and European contemporary artists. Picasso found inspiration for Demoiselles in art history and contemporary visual culture. Through a variety of new visual technologies, visitors to the exhibit could understand how he synthesized and transformed these diverse sources - from Iberian, African, Oceanic, and Egyptian art to Baroque painting, Cezanne's and Gauguin's work, and colonial photographers' images of African women - to launch a radically new artistic vocabulary.



The largest section of the exhibition highlighted the continuing pull of the painting - over 100 years after its creation - as evidenced in the work of international artists, including Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou, Gerri Davis, Damian Elwes, Julian Friedler, Kathleen Gilje, Carlo Maria Mariani, Sophie Matisse, Stas Orlovski, and Jackson Tupper.

LAURA BLEREAU is a New York-based writer and curator, and the director of bitforms gallery--a showcase for new media. She has produced performance work, curated exhibitions of artists working in diverse new media formats, and written on new media work. JANIE COHEN directs the Fleming Museum of Art at the University of Vermont. She has published numerous essays and articles on Picasso in the United States, Spain, the Netherlands, and Germany, and has curated exhibitions and written catalogue essays on a wide range of subjects in twentieth-century art. BETH GERSH-NESIC has published two books on André Salmon and is currently working on a third; she also has written numerous articles on other topics in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. She is founder and director of the New Yorks Arts Exchange, an arts-education service offering lectures, tours, and studio visits. Gersh-Ne i serves as adjunct professor at Purchase College.