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Les Femmes d'Alger (Version O)

Pablo Picasso

Les Femmes d'Alger (Version O)

1955

Pablo Picasso's 'Les Femmes d'Alger, Version O' (1955) is the last of fifteen variations he painted in 1954–1955 on Eugène Delacroix's 1834 orientalist canvas 'The Women of Algiers'. Dismembering the reclining odalisques into the shards and planes of his late Cubist vocabulary, Picasso rebuilt Delacroix's harem interior out of fractured colour. At Christie's New York in 2015, Version O sold for USD 179.4 million, then the highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction. SFMOMA holds other works from the same series as part of its postwar modernist collection.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons