Skip to content

Museum Berggruen

Picasso & Les Femmes d'Alger

May 21, 2021 - July 8, 2021

Back
This is an image of Picasso, Les Femmes d'Alger Version H produced on 24 January 1955. IT represents three women depicted in a cubic and simplified way. One of them in seated on the left wearing a traditional red outfit and smoking hookah. Next to her is another woman naked laying on the floor on her back with her arms crossed behind her head and her legs up and crossed. The composition is dense the background is depicted ornamented tiles on the walls. In the center background behind these two front figures we can see a third woman who is black and dressed all in green white is walking through the door.

Picasso, Les Femmes d'Alger (Version J), 26 janvier 1955, 1955
Oil on canvas
114 x 146 cm. (45 x 57 1/2 in.)
©Helly Nahmad Gallery NY

 

BERLIN
MUSEUM BERGGRUEN
Picasso & Les Femmes d'Alger
May 21, 2021 - July 8, 2021

 

The Nahmad Collection is pleased to participate to Picasso & Les Femmes d'Alger held at the Museum Berggruen in Berlin.

Pablo Picasso’s late work begins in 1954 with Les Femmes d’Alger, one of his most important and extraordinary series of works. Long scattered all around the world, Museum Bergruen will be showing the majority of these oil paintings in what will be the first such show in Germany for 65 years. This series of paintings proposes an altered perspective on painting, and is unique in Picasso’s oeuvre in terms of its artistic variation.

Inspired by Eugène Delacroix’s famous depictions of the Women of Algiers (1834 and 1849), which he had studied at the Louvre, Picasso took the notion of painterly variation to utterly new dimensions: over three months in the winter of 1954–55, he produced 15 oil paintings along with more than 100 sketches and prints, in which he varied the arrangement of Delacroix’s figures to the point of anatomical distortion. Some of the depictions are full of vibrant colours and soft curves, while others are reminiscent of his Cubist phase with sharp edges in tones of grey. The abundance of variation and the diverse references to art history make this series into one of the great manifestoes on the possibilities of painting.