Duke University Press Picasso's Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece

In Picasso's Demoiselles, eminent art historian Suzanne Preston Blier uncovers the previously unknown history of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, one of the twentieth century's most important, celebrated, and studied paintings. Drawing on her expertise in African art and newly discovered sources, Blier reads the painting not as a simple bordello scene, but as Picasso's interpretation of the diversity of representations of women from around the world he encountered in photographs and sculptures. These representations are central to understanding the painting's creation and help identify the demoiselles as global figures, mothers, grandmothers, lovers, and sisters, as well as part of the colonial world Picasso inhabited. Simply put, Blier fundamentally transforms what we know about this revolutionary and iconic work. Review " Picasso's Demoiselles is ... a lighthearted, even playful, book.... Blier is an extraordinary writer; her scholarly production is legendary, and her publications have shaped the field of African studies."--Monica Blackmun Visonà "Art Journal" (10/1/2020 12:00:00 AM) "Every age has had its own interpretation of the Demoiselles d'Avignon and with it, its own narrative of Modernism.... Blier's interpretation is doubly interesting, directed as it is at cultural and gender identities and is, without doubt, the one which corresponds ... to our present."--Maite Méndez Baiges (translated by Diana Mathieson) "African Studies Quarterly" (1/1/2021 12:00:00 AM) "What makes Blier's book truly remarkable is not only its attention to the details surrounding Picasso's life and work in the years when he painted Les Demoiselles but also her forensic approach to the subject."--Simon Gikandi "Art Journal" (10/1/2020 12:00:00 AM) "The book, which features hundreds of illustrations . . . is full of a vast and intriguing array of highways and forays into every possible connection that might suggest itself to construct this argument. As a Black feminist, I found most persuasive Blier's proposition to table the idea of Les demoiselles as a brothel scene and see it, rather, as a reference to the turn-of-the-century fascination with the portrayal of racial types."--Michele Wallace "Artforum" (12/1/2020 12:00:00 AM) "Blier offers a wide-ranging account of the genesis, sources, and context for Picasso's influential masterpiece. In both cases it is especially timely and meaningful to have women shaping the conversation. . . . Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals."--E. Baden "Choice" (7/1/2020 12:00:00 AM) "Blier uses a host of techniques including formal analysis, textual analysis, and broader global image culture to dig deep into this one painting. Most exciting is when she points out obvious but overlooked information in widely known documentation, including period photographs of Demoiselles in process that show how Picasso developed the composition. Ultimately, Blier offers a reading thoroughly of our time--one in which women are empowered and time and space compressed."--Maggie Taft "Booklist" (6/14/2019 12:00:00 AM) Review “It is a condition of masterworks that they attract, even demand, interpretation and reinterpretation. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a case in point. In 1946, Alfred Barr called it ‘a battlefield of trial and experiment’ marking ‘the beginning of a new period in the history of modern art.’ Twenty-six years later, Leo Steinberg argued that its psychic and pictorial ‘violence’ resides in its power of displacement, in ‘the startled consciousness of a viewer who sees himself seen.’ Others have examined its ‘primitivism’ and l’art negre as central to its power and originality. Now, Suzanne Blier, through a close textual and visual analysis of an astonishing range of references, argues that Picasso’s creativity ‘involved both drawing on and subverting the past’ while reimagining the present and creating the future anew. Bli