Studio of the artist (1881-1973);  [Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris]; sold in 1956 to Victor Ganz (1913-1987), New York; [Paul Rosenberg & Co., New York, inv. no. 1340]; [sold March 1969 to Richard Feigen Gallery, New York]; [Galerie Rosengart, Lucerne]; sold in 1997 to Janice and Henri Lazarof, Los Angeles; given in 2005 to LACMA.

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.