BURLINGTON, VT.- Following a rich fall semester of exhibitions and programs related to the Civil War, the Fleming Museum of Art makes a 180 turn to present an experimental, high-tech exhibition that focuses on one of the most important paintings of the 20th century, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which he painted in Paris in 1907 at age twenty-five. Featured in their East Gallery this spring, the museum presents Staring Back: the Creation and Legacy of Picasso’s Demoiselles, combining leading scholarship, advanced visual and sound technologies, and contemporary art to offer new insights into the birth of modern art through an unusual and provocative exhibition experience.

Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon created an uproar in the Paris art world and laid the foundation for the development of Cubism. The Fleming Museum presents a unique exhibition that explores Picasso’s extraordinary process in creating the painting, through innovative installations and advanced technologies that transform the museum experience. The painting’s ongoing legacy is examined through the work of a diverse group of American, African, and European contemporary artists. While Demoiselles does not travel from its home in the Museum of Modern Art, it is being represented at the Fleming in an unprecedented manner.

Visitors will be introduced to the painting in an environment that evokes Picasso’s studio at the “Bateau Lavoir,” where he first showed Demoiselles to his close friends and colleagues in 1907; their reactions may be heard against a background of ambient sounds that would have echoed through the streets of Montmartre at the time. Augmented reality will enable visitors to view images of Picasso’s studies for the individual figures and the full composition in the context of the painting, and to understand its evolution.

Picasso found inspiration for Demoiselles in art history and contemporary visual culture. Through a variety of new visual technologies, visitors will understand how he synthesized and transformed these diverse sources – from Iberian, African, Oceanic, and Egyptian art to Baroque painting, Cezanne’s and Gauguin’s work, and colonial photographers’ images of African women – to launch a radically new artistic vocabulary.

The largest section of the exhibition highlights the continuing traction of the painting – over 100 years after its creation – as evidenced in the work of international artists, including Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou, Gerri Davis, Damian Elwes, Julian Friedler, Kathleen Gilje, Carlo Maria Mariani, Sophie Matisse, Stas Orlovski, and Jackson Tupper.

Staring Back was conceived and curated by Janie Cohen, Director of the Fleming Museum of Art. The exhibition is informed by the work of numerous Picasso scholars, including Cohen, who has published on Picasso for over thirty years and whose new research on anthropometric-style colonial African photography and Demoiselles will be published in the journal Photography and Culture in March, 2015. Cohen’s project collaborators are Coberlin Brownell ‘95, Assistant Professor, Emergent Media Program at Champlain College, Burlington, Vermont; and Jenn Karson ‘93, Sound Artist; Adjunct Lecturer, UVM College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences; and Founder, Vermont Makers, Burlington, Vermont.