ACADEMIA Letters How Innovative Was Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon? Arnold Cusmariu How Innovative Was Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon? 1 Background Completed in 1907 when Picasso was 26, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (LDA) 2 was exhibited publicly for the frst time in 1916 at Galerie Barbazanges. Jacques Doucet purchased it from Picasso in 1924 for his Neuilly home. Future Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., saw it there in 1935 and persuaded MOMA founder and director A. Conger Goodyear to acquire it, who did so in December 1937 from Germain Seligmann, who got it from the Doucet estate. LDA went on display at the MOMA in 1939 and has been there ever since as one of the museum’s star attractions. Of to a Rocky Start Picasso contemporaries Matisse, Braque and Derain had harsh words for LDA, as did art critics Frank Gelett Burgess and Félix Fénéon. Gertrude Stein’s brother Leo unloaded decades later. One of my goals is to explain why they and others overreacted. 1 This article is based on an unpublished briefng I delivered in 2018 at the University of South Florida, Tampa; the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida; and the Tampa Museum of Art. For helpful discussion, I thank Professor Wallace Wilson of USF; Dr. Peter Tush of the Dali Museum; and Ms. Nancy Seijas-Kipnis of the TMA. See also my articles [9] - [14] in References. 2 Images of Demoiselle may be found online. Copyright restrictions prevent their usage here. Academia Letters, September 2021 Corresponding Author: Arnold Cusmariu, bravo323@gmail.com Citation: Cusmariu, A. (2021). How Innovative Was Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon? Academia Letters, Article 3518. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL3518. 1 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0