WORLD
RECORD PRICE TAG--Pablo Picasso’s
1955 Les femmes d’Alger oil on canvas
sold yesterday for a world record sum for public auctions totaling $179.4
million. The famed auction house did not
reveal the buyer. Reportedly, the painting
is heading to a private collection in Europe.
The following is excerpted from Christie’s pre-auction program:
‘To me there is no past
or future in my art,’ wrote Pablo Picasso in 1923. ‘If a work of art cannot
live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the
Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is
not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was…’
‘In today’s fast-paced world,’ says Christie’s curator Loic Gouzer,
‘it is remarkable to think that Picasso’s Les femmes d’Alger exhibits as much
freshness of perspective and approach as it did when it was painted.’
The vibrant painting is the final and most highly finished work
from Picasso’s 1954-55 Femmes d’Alger series in which he looked back to 19th
century French master Eugene Delacroix for inspiration, and in the process
created a new style of painting.
‘Les femmes d’Alger, (Version “O”) is the culmination of a
herculean project which Picasso started after Matisse’s death, in homage to his
lost friend and competitor, and which over a period of two months and after
nearly 100 studies on paper and 14 other paintings led to the creation of this
phenomenal canvas in February 1955,’ explains Olivier Camu, Deputy Chairman,
Impressionist and Modern Art.
Picasso painted a series of 15 variations on Delacroix’s Les
femmes d’Alger between December 1954 and February 1955, designated as versions
A through O. Throughout his series, Picasso references the Spanish master’s two
versions of the shared subject, intermingling their elements.
The artist had been fascinated by Delacroix all his adult life,
and by Les femmes d’Alger in particular. In addition to being an homage to
Delacroix, Picasso conceived the series as an elegy to his friend and great
artistic rival, Henri Matisse. Matisse had died in November 1954, five weeks
before Picasso began the series. Matisse viewed Delacroix as his immediate
forebear in terms of colour and Orientalist subject matter.
Over the years, Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’) has been
featured prominently in major Picasso retrospectives all over the world,
including at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1957 and 1980, The National
Gallery in London in 1960, the Grand Palais, Paris in 1966-1967, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 1968, and more recently at the survey
Picasso et les Maîtres at the Louvre in 2008-2009, as well as at Picasso: Challenging
the Past, at London’s National Gallery in 2009, and Picasso & Modern
British Art at the Tate Britain in 2012.
‘With its packed composition, play on cubism and perspective,
its violent colours, and its brilliant synthesis of Picasso’s lifelong obsessions,
it is a milestone in Picasso’s oeuvre and one of his most famous masterpieces,
together with Les demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, and Guernica, 1937,’ says Camu.
‘One can arguably say that this is the single most important painting by
Picasso to remain in private hands.’
Previously sold at Christie’s in 1997, as part of the
record-breaking sale of the Collection of Victor and Sally Ganz, this iconic
work promises to cause a sensation on the global art market this spring.
Christie’s holds the world auction record for a work by Pablo Picasso with
Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, 1932, sold for $106.5 million in New York in May
2010.
Les
femmes d’Alger (Version
“O”) now holds the world record for art sold at auction. Other private sales,
according to Christie’s, may have surpassed the total spent Monday evening, but
such deals are seldom made public. Picasso labeled his Alger series from A to O.
EUGENE
DELACROIX ORIGINAL
Women of Algiers in their Apartment (French: Femmes d'Alger dans
leur appartement) is an 1834 oil on canvas painting by Eugène Delacroix. It is
located in the Louvre, Paris, France. The painting was first displayed at the
Salon, where it was universally admired. King Louis Philippe bought it and
presented it to the Musée du Luxembourg, which at that time was a museum for
contemporary art. After the death of the artist in 1874 the painting was moved
to the Louvre, where it is held today.
The painting is notable for its sexual connotations; it depicts
Algerian concubines of a harem with a hookah, used to smoke hashish or opium.
In the 19th century, the composition was known for its sexual content and its
orientalism. The painting served as a source of inspiration to the later
impressionists, and a series of 15 paintings and numerous drawings by Pablo
Picasso in 1954—WIKIPEDIA.
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