Creative Minds Speaker Series Part IV: Picasso’s Demoiselles

Suzanne Preston Blier, PhD
Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts, Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

Suzanne Preston Blier, PhD, set the art history world abuzz with her recent research on Pablo Picasso’s infamous work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. In her book, Picasso’s Demoiselles, Blier uncovers the previously unknown history of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, notably 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, sisters, and part of the colonial world that Picasso inhabited. Blier fundamentally transforms what we know about this revolutionary and iconic work.
Picasso’s Demoiselles won the 2020 Robert Motherwell Award for an outstanding publication in the history and criticism of modernism in the arts by the Dedalus Foundation.

Blier is an American art historian and professor at at Harvard. She is a member of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and a faculty associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

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