The Women of Algiers, after Delacroix (Variation D)

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The Women of Algiers, after Delacroix (Variation D)

France, 1955
Paintings
Oil on canvas
18 1/8 × 21 1/8 in. (46.04 × 53.66 cm)
Partial, fractional and promised gift of Janice and Henri Lazarof (M.2005.70.109)
Currently on public view:
Broad Contemporary Art Museum, floor 3

Since gallery displays may change often, please contact us before you visit to make certain this item is on view.

Label

Picasso’s Women of Algiers, painted shortly after the Algerian War of Independence began, draws its inspiration from work by artists Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) and Henri Matisse (1869–1954)....
Picasso’s Women of Algiers, painted shortly after the Algerian War of Independence began, draws its inspiration from work by artists Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) and Henri Matisse (1869–1954). Picasso, who had studied Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1834) in the Louvre and was aware of Matisse’s portraits of French women in Moroccan dress, began a series of fifteen Women of Algiers paintings in 1954, of which this is the fourth. The dense and layered composition is based on Delacroix’s painting, and the seated, bare-breasted woman (probably Picasso’s new lover, Jacqueline Roque) with striped pantaloons was a direct quotation from Matisse’s portraits. Scenes such as these objectifying women and depicting them in what were deemed exotic settings reflect how Western artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries engaged with North African culture through a colonialist lens.

Wall label, 2021.
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Bibliography

  • Barron, Stephanie. Envisioning Modernism: The Janice and Henri Lazarof Collection. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Munich; New York: DelMonico Books-Prestel, 2012.