Les Femmes d'Alger

Pablo Picasso, Les femmes d’Alger, 1955, version O. Private collection.

Eugène Delacroix, Women of Algiers in their Apartment, 1834. Oil on canvas. 180 × 229cm. Louvre, Paris.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Parisiennes in Algerian Costume, 1872. Oil on canvas. 156 × 129cm. National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.

Les Femmes d'Alger is a series of 15 paintings and numerous drawings by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. The series was inspired by Eugène Delacroix's 1834 painting Women of Algiers in their Apartment. The series is one of several painted by Picasso in tribute to artists that he admired.

The entire series of Les Femmes d'Alger was bought by Victor and Sally Ganz from the Galerie Louise Leiris in Paris for $212,500 in June 1956. Many of the individual paintings in the series are now in prominent public and private collections.

Origin

In December 1954, Picasso began to paint a series of free variations on Delacroix's Les Femmes d'Alger. He began his first version (cat. 19) six weeks after learning of the death of his lifelong friend and rival Henri Matisse — and so, for Picasso, the "oriental" subject of this series of paintings held strong associations with Matisse as well as with Delacroix. Matisse had been famous for his images of languid, voluptuous women known as odalisques — the French form of the Turkish word for women in a harem. "When Matisse died he left his odalisques to me as a legacy," joked Picasso. Many of Picasso's portrayals of Jacqueline circa 1955–56 represent her in this guise (cat. 9).

The consequences of Picasso's Femmes d'Alger series were far-reaching: "I thought so much about Les Femmes d'Alger that I bought La Californie," Picasso explained to his biographer Pierre Daix. La Californie is a Belle-Époque villa situated in the foothills of Cannes in the South of France, where Picasso spent his last decades. Picasso bought it in 1955, and it was here that he painted the Nude in a Rocking-Chair (cat. 16). The light-filled interiors, the views over the Mediterranean and the exotic garden evoked a feeling of spaciousness and ease which corresponded to Picasso's idea of the Orient.

The art historian and collector Douglas Cooper was perhaps the first to realise that the paintings done at La Californie marked a return to Picasso's peak form. In April 1956, he wrote to the curator Alfred Barr:

"I recently spent the day with Picasso and went through most of what he has done since last July. I have been greatly impressed...A whole series of interiors of La Californie deriving half from Delacroix half from Matisse — great emphasis on ornament, arabesque, simplification...In short, as you are planning to come to Europe, this is a word to tell you that you must see all this in the studio: it is to my mind much better than anything since 1946."

List of works

"Version H"

"Version H" was completed on 24 January 1955 and is part of the Nahmad Collection in Switzerland. As of May 2015, it was on loan to Tate Liverpool, England.

"Version J"

"Version J" was sold at Sotheby's in London in 2006 for $18.6 million and is part of the Nahmad Collection.

"Version L"

"Version L" was bought by the Berggruen Museum in Berlin in 2011 for $11.4 million.

"Version N"

"Version N" is held by the Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St Louis, and was bought by the Steinberg Fund for the university in 1960.

"Version O"

"Version O", the final painting in the series, was painted in 1955.

The painting sold for $31.9 million in November 1997 as part of the Ganz's collection. Version O was bought at its 1997 sale by the British art dealer Libby Howie for an anonymous buyer.

It was auctioned in May 2015 at Christie's auction house in New York City. It was expected to set a world record price for a work of art at auction. A pre-sale valuation of $140 million was placed by Christie's on Version 'O', which was one of the highest ever placed on an auctioned artwork. The most expensive work of art to publicly sell at auction, Three Studies of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon, had sold for $142.4 million against a pre-sale estimate of c.$85 million. An undisclosed minimum sale price had been placed on the painting before the sale by Christie's. "Version O" sold for $179.3 million, a record price for a painting at auction.