Staring Back: On Picasso’s Demoiselles d'Avignon

The catalogue of a 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.