Artforum International has named Suzanne Blier's "Picasso’s Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece" one of their best books of 2020. The full review by Michele Wallace is available to read on the Artforum International website. The book has also won the 2020 Robert Motherwell Book Award from the Dedalus Foundation.
...
"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 that 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."
