1955, Pablo Picasso, The Women of Algiers, after Delacroix (Version D) -- Los Angeles County Museum of Art
From the museum 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, 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.
1955, Pablo Picasso, The Women of Algiers, after Delacroix (Version D) -- Los Angeles County Museum of Art
From the museum 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, 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.