Staring Back: On Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon

Product Description

This book documents the Fleming Museum of Art’s spring 2015 exhibition, Staring Back: The Creation and Legacy of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. It includes a fictional piece that explores the newly revealed connections between Les Demoiselles and a genre of colonial African photographic “erotica” marketed in Paris in the early twentieth century; an essay on the life of the painting from its creation until its purchase by the Museum of Modern Art; and an essay on the audio, video, and other advanced technologies used in the exhibition to reintroduce the ambitious, then twenty-five-year-old Picasso to the public. It also features brief entries on the works of ten contemporary artists in the exhibition–work that engages Les Demoiselles more than a century after its creation.
The text is written in a lively, contemporary manner and will appeal to the general public as well as Picasso scholars.

About the Author

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.