Gazette: The man behind the big art show

Michael De Marsche has introduced Colorado Springs to the big honking art exhibition: Chihuly, Warhol, Peter Max — shows with mass appeal. It’s appropriate that in choosing his first speaker for the Fine Arts Center’s reopening, the center’s president and CEO went for the guy who invented the blockbuster art show: Thomas Hoving. Read the complete article here.

Hoving pens Picasso article for L.A. Times

Thomas Hoving, a very special guest at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center's Extremely Grand Opening, Aug. 2-5, penned a story in the Los Angeles Times recently entitled, "Nothing Like This Picasso."

"PABLO PICASSO's great "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" is 100 years old this spring," writes Hoving. "Starting Wednesday, New York's Museum of Modern Art will show it after a painstaking cleaning, along with nine rarely seen pre-studies.

"I remember my first thought on seeing it for the first time. "Ugly!" The painting exploded in my eyes like some kind of pink, blue and beige bomb. I was shocked by its teeth-shattering primitiveness and downright brutality."

Read the whole story here. | Buy Thomas Hoving tickets here.