Upon the death of his friend Henri Matisse in November 1954, Pablo Picasso wanted to explore in his artwork a subject that had enchanted Matisse: odalisques. The genre of Orientalism became popular in France after Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix visited Algeria in 1832, and his subsequent paintings reflected an exoticized version of Northern Africa, including depictions of reclining odalisques surrounded by hashish pipes, lavish jewels and costumes, and extravagant settings. In 1854, he painted the influential painting The Women of Algiers in their Apartment, which now hangs at the Louvre.
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Renoir declared it the "most beautiful painting in existence." This painting was Picasso's main inspiration for his Les Femmes d'Alger series, and he would produce 15 paintings for the series between December 1954 and February 1955.
All 15 paintings, titled Les Femmes d'Alger and lettered 'A' through 'O', were sold in 1956 to American art collectors Victor and Sally Ganz in Paris. The Ganz's resold many of the works in the US, and today, they are dispersed throughout private collections and museums like LACMA, SFMOMA and the Wadsworth Atheneum. Picasso's final painting of the series, Version 'O', was sold in May 2015 at Christie's for $170.4 million to the Prime Minister of Qatar, making it the second most expensive painting ever auctioned.
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Now, Version 'F' will be auctioned by Christie's on July 10. While no estimate has been publicly announced, it is expected to fetch in the $25 million range.
Picasso painted Version 'F' in January 1955, and it marks a half-way point between the smaller canvases of the first seven works and the larger sizes of the second half. However, Version 'F' arguably resembles the famous Version 'O,' the pièce de résistance of the series, more than any of the other works. The impressive use of color, geometrical abstraction and similar composition make Version 'F' appear as a smaller oil study for the Picasso's masterpiece Version 'O', in which he sharpened the lines, enhanced the details and saturated the brushstrokes.
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This painting will be one of the top highlights for Christie's blockbuster ONE sale on July 10. Spanning four cities (New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong), the two-hour livestream auction will feature 35 modern and contemporary works by Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, Zao Wou-Ki, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Brice Marden.
