Picasso's Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
Picasso's Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece Details
Review "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 Published On: 2019-06-14 Read more Review “Combining the specialized skills of an art historian with the zeal of a detective, Suzanne Preston Blier offers a bold and transformative re-reading of the Demoiselles. She startlingly shifts the interpretive foundations of Picasso and the Demoiselles: she shows us a Picasso not as bombastic egotist but as capacious globalist; not as masculine master fixated on female sexuality and its attendant anxieties, but as explorer of the power and presence of women and their generative capacities. This provocative and pathbreaking book scrambles the logic of modernism, primitivism, and feminism in the discipline of art history.” -- Debora Silverman, author of, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art Read more See all Editorial Reviews
Reviews
Suzanne Preston Blier is a leading Africanist in the United States and former President of the College Art Association., the professional association of artists and art historians in the United States. This is a major interdisciplinary reinterpretation of a groundbreaking work of art, often seen as the beginning of Modernism. Bringing together art history, anthropology, gender studies, literary studies, and historical context, this study opens new perspectives on Picasso's masterpiece. You will learn much about Picasso and early modern art in Paris, not seen since Carol Duncan's critical museum studies and Leo Steinberg's Other Criteria. A must read for all Picasso followers. George Gorse, Art Historian, Pomona College