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This course offers a critical introduction to modernist painting and its eurocentric art history by focusing on the work and reception of Pablo Picasso. At the center of the course is Picasso’s celebrated yet controversial painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907. Our point of departure is the recent rehang of the New York MoMA’s historical Cubism gallery. For decades, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was positioned there as the prescient “masterwork,” surrounded by other cubist paintings. In 2019, however, the painting was thought-provokingly juxtaposed with Faith Ringgold’s work American People Series #20: Die of 1967, a figurative painting responding to civil rights struggles in the United States. What occasioned this curatorial intervention? Why does Picasso’s painting remain such a point of contention in exhibiting modern and contemporary art today? And what other curatorial and art historical strategies might be used to continue to decenter the canon? We will deepen our discussions with close-looking and collaborative visual analysis of paintings in the Phillips Collection and the National Gallery in Washington D.C. as well as local collections. We will also consult online collections and, in our course readings, consider formalist, social, feminist, and decolonial approaches to modern art. No prior familiarity with Picasso or modern art is necessary. Students from all fields are welcome.