Pablo Picasso's Les femmes d’Alger sold at auction for $179.3 million, making it the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction. While art prices have inflated for dubious reasons in the last decade with pieces often trading beyond their intrinsic artistic merit, this is indeed a masterpiece of the highest order and the culmination of a series Picasso painted, fifteen works in fact on this subject, that were a poignant expression of his love for two artists, one a predecessor, Eugene Delacroix, and one a recently deceased contemporary, Henri Matisse.
In 1834, Delacroix had painted his Women of Algiers in the bold colors that Picasso loved, in a nod to the Orient whose subject matter and aesthetic fascinated Picasso.
While Picasso's rendering here is uniquely his own, one can easily see the conversation he is having with a previous master. And too, one can see the graphic abstraction of form and shape and the sense of collage that his chief rival Matisse often employed, indeed in his own work entitled The Woman of Algiers. Picasso references these with care and affection, and in the very months after Matisse's death.
Matisse and Picasso were actually friends, but intense competitors as well, and this legendary adversarial posture was responsible for some of the greatest art in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
Great artists have a sense of history and subvert their mighty egos to their place in time. Picasso does that here in a composition of such complexity that the work stands alone. But it rises to greater heights in this astounding gesture of gratitude.
