'Women of Algiers in Their Apartments' (paintings)

choi

Lance Esplund. Feverish Variations on a Past Theme. Wall Street Journals, July 3, 2021 (in the Review section that appears every Saturday).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fev ... t-theme-11625259751
https://newsazi.com/feverish-variations-on-a-past-theme/


Note:
(a)
(i) This is  review of an exhibition:
Picasso & Les Femmes d’Alger. Museum Berggruen, May 21 - Aug 21, 2021
https://www.smb.museum/en/museum ... -les-femmes-dalger/
("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")
(ii) SMB in the URL stands for Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. See (d)(i)(A) and (ii) below.


(b) "In 1831-32, Delacroix (1798-1863) toured Morocco. A visit to a sultan’s apartment (harem) in Algiers inspired Delacroix’s two paintings, whose emotionally driven color laid the foundations for European Modernism. Each includes a reclining odalisque, two seated women around a hookah, and a female Black servant. The life-size figures in the 1834 version, twice as large as the 1849 painting, are equally illuminated, up-close. The 1849 version, darker and less distinct, is spatially deeper yet friezelike. Mysteriously dreamy, bathed in bronze light, its somnolent women appear like memories summoned in a post-coital fog."
(i) The paragraph is diagonal to
Women of Algiers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_of_Algiers
("Women of Algiers in their Apartment (French: Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement) * * * it [title of the painting] is devoid of the objectifying terms odalisque or harem. * * * Jewish Wedding in Morocco (c 1841) and Jewish Bride (c 1832) * * * As soon as he would seek to sketch them from afar, the Arabic women who would hang their washing out on roof terraces would immediately alert their husbands. * * * [section 4] 1847–1849 painting[:] * * * Instead of leaving the scene the black slave is now lifting away the curtain to reveal the seated women to the viewer")
(A) French-English dictionary:
* dans (preposition): "in"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dans
* leur: "their; them"
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/french-english/leur
* appartement (noun masculine; through Italian from Spanish noun masculine apartamiento separation (verb is apartar separate)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apartamiento

The English noun apartment is a direct descendant of the French word appartement.
croix (noun feminine; pronunciation; ultimately from Latin [noun feminine] crux [cross]): "cross"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/croix

The English noun cross also comes from Latin crux, via a different route (not through French but through Old English).
(B) English dictionary:
* odalisque (n; French, from Turkish odalik [chambermaid], from oda room)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/odalisque
* harem (n; etymology; Did You Know?)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/harem
* washing (n): "a quantity of clothes, bed linen, etc. that is to be washed or has just been washed  <she took her washing around to the laundromat>"
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/washing
* somnolent (adj; The Sleepy History of Somnolent: Latin [noun masculine] somnus sleep)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/somnolent
(C) "the black slave is now lifting away the curtain"

This Wikipedia page lacks details for the 1839 painting (due to its small size). The largest size of this painting that I can find free in the Web is from Musee Fabre, which does NOT have this painting standing alone. See
file:///C:/Users/WPL/Downloads/XIXEe_Delacroix_Femmes_d'Alger%20(6).pdf
, where you can see Delacroix deliberately blurred the whole scene (including but not limited to facial features and clothing of the three women) except the black woman in the foreground.
(ii) Eugène Delacroix
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugène_Delacroix
(one painting hascaption: "Jewish Wedding in Morocco, c 1839, Louvre")

Delacroix
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delacroix
(iii) The adjective somnolent is defined above in (a)(i).
(iv) frieze
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frieze


(c) "But from Dec 13, 1954, to Apr 14, 1955, Delacroix's 'Women' overtook him like a fever. Obsessed, Picasso, age 73, produced a monumental series of transformative variations on Delacroix's two paintings: 15 canvases (seven of them large), numerous drawings and a set of lithographs. A cinematic tour-de-force, the paintings—employing Cubist structure, grisaille and flat primary colors; and drawing from the well of art history—freely break down, combine and re-envision Delacroix's originals.  Theories abound regarding Picasso's sudden lovesickness over Delacroix's 'Women.' One was the recent death of Henri Matisse [1869 – Nov 3, 1954 (age 84)]. Picasso once jokingly remarked that 'When Matisse died, he left his odalisques to me as a legacy,' meaning he now felt not only entitled but obligated to revivify Matisse's signature image. Others include the onset of Algeria's war of independence and Picasso's budding relationship with his future wife Jacqueline Roque, who looked exactly like one of Delacroix's Algerian harem women."
(i) vivify
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vivify
(ii) "(1927 – 1986 (age 59) [French] * * * Pablo Picasso met Jacqueline in 1953 at the Madoura Pottery when she was 26 years old and he was 72. * * * They married in Vallauris[, France,] on Mar 2, 1961. * * * Jacqueline Picasso shot herself in 1986 in her Mougins home"  en.wikipedia.org for "Jacqueline Roque."
(iii) cubism: "Cubism was a revolutionary new approach to representing reality invented in around 1907–08 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They brought different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted"   Tate Museum, undated (under the heading "ART TERM").https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/c/cubism
(iv)
(A) Matisse/ Odalisque. Norton Simon Museum, Feb 22-June 17, 2019 (exhibition).
https://www.nortonsimon.org/exhi ... 9/matisseodalisque/
("Henri Matisse's Odalisque with Tambourine (Harmony in Blue) (1926)")
(B) https://www.nortonsimon.org/art/detail/M.1966.07.P/
("Medium: Oil on canvas[;] Credit Line: Norton Simon Art Foundation[;] Accession Number: M.1966.07.P[;] Description [at the bottom of the Web page])
(C) Museum History. Norton Simon Museum, undated
https://www.nortonsimon.org/about/museum-history/
("The history of the Norton Simon Museum begins with the Pasadena Art Institute. The Institute was founded in 1922 and incorporated two years later on August 14, 1924 as a privately endowed, nonprofit institution. Originally comprised of local citizens, the primary goals of the Institution were to establish and maintain a museum and library of art as well as encourage the study of fine arts [same as Art Institute of Chicago]. * * * A pivotal point in the history of the Pasadena Art Institute came in 1953, when it received a bequest of almost 500 artworks from the estate of [female art collector] Galka E Scheyer. * * * [In 1975] the name of the institution changed to the Norton Simon Museum of Art at Pasadena" (Simon was rich) )


(d) " 'Picasso & Les Femmes d'Alger” ('Picasso & The Women of Algiers'), an exhibition at the Museum Berggruen at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (through Aug. 29), puts Picasso’s series in context. It reunites nine of Picasso's 15 'Women of Algiers' canvases (labeled 'A' through 'O'), numerous drawings, prints and related artworks with Delacroix's 1849 version of 'Women.' (A virtual tour of the show is being rolled out in stages on the Berggruen Museum's Instagram and the Nationalgalerie's YouTube channel. The introduction is already available and the remaining episodes will be posted July 3, 17, 31 and Aug 14.)"
(i)
(A) Berlin State Museums
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_State_Museums   
(German: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; section 1 Museum locations, section 1.3 Charlottenburg: "Museum Berggruen: classic modern art")
(B) Museum Berggruen is named after
Heinz Berggruen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_Berggruen
(1914 – 2007; born in Berlin to assimilated Jewish parents * * * He fled Germany in 1936" and came to US that year; After the war, he lived in Paris as art dealer; In 2000 sold his collection he valued at €750m at 1/4 of that price to Berlin as a gesture of reconciliation)
(ii) German-English dictionary:
* staatlich (adj; [noun masculine] Staat [state] +‎ -lich; strong nominative plural  staatliche): "belonging or referring to the state"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/staatlich
* Museum (noun neuter; plural  Museen): "museum"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Museum
   ^ The words had its origin in Ancient Greek Mouseîon, shrine of the Muses.
       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muses
* zu (preposition): "in, on, at"  (in German, of is von.)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zu


(e) "In paintings 'A' through 'F,' Picasso familiarizes himself with the women and room. He diagrams, color-codes, regroups and re-emphasizes them. He puts women to sleep; undresses them; passes the hookah; adds bowls of fruit; and conflates, invents and moves figures and doorways. In 'C,' an eroticized frenzy, he merges haloed-woman and doorway into a phallic form also suggesting Cycladic idol, cactus plant, vulva and lighted candle."
(i) Les Femmes d'Alger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Femmes_d%27Alger
("The entire series [A through O] of Les Femmes d'Alger was bought by Victor and Sally Ganz from the Galerie Louise Leiris in Paris for $212,500 in June 1956 (equivalent to $2 million in 2020)" )
(ii) The entire series of A to O can be see two thirds down the Web page of
Ekaterina Moong, Women of Algiers. Pablo Picasso. la frimeuse, Feb 24, 2016.
http://www.lafrimeuse.com/en/women-of-algiers-pablo-picasso/
(A) la frimeuse is the name of a English-language website, which states, "Ekaterina Mungalova aka Ekaterina Moong is graphic designer with specialty in branding, corporate identity, digital art and jewelry design, based in Saint Petersburg."
(B) French-English dictionary:
* frimeur (noun masculine; feminine  frimeuse): "show off" (a person who shows off)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/frimeur
(iii) For Cycladic idol, see Cycladic culture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycladic_culture
("was a Bronze Age culture (c 3200–c 1050 BC) found throughout the islands of the Cyclades in the Aegean Sea. * * * Cycladic culture is best known for its schematic flat female idols carved out of the islands' pure white marble" / photo caption: "Cycladic idol, Parian marble; 1.5 m high (largest known example of Cycladic sculpture. 2800–2300 BC")

(f) "And in the two Cubist, grisaille portraits, 'G' (depicting the standing servant) and 'L' (a Matissean seated odalisque), Picasso sets single figures free. * * * In versions 'A' through 'N,' we sense Picasso searching, remaking, conflating—flexing his creative muscle. In 'O,' his final symphonic series canvas, everything resolves. It is immediate, revelatory. Here, space and form, faceted, are continual, synthetic. The glimmering, seated odalisque—hovering, jewel-like, smoking the hookah—is frontal and emblematic. Reborn—no longer Matissean—she presides like a goddess, as the other figures and interior flow out of her like a kaleidoscopic vision. Delacroix’s two paintings, transcended, seem to float somewhere beyond Picasso's 'O,' like ancestral memories dreamed by these newfound women of Algiers. Picasso, the artist, steps aside. And Picasso's muses, liberated, take possession of the stage."
(i) I do not know why "L" -- or any other of this series -- is Matissean.
(ii) John Richardson, Between Picasso and Matisse. Vanity Affairs, February 2003.
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2003/02/picasso-matisse200302

Quote:

"New York's Museum of Modern Art, in collaboration with London’s Tate Modern and Paris's Musée Picasso and Centre Pompidou, is now devoting another blockbuster exhibition to the relationship between the two artists—a relationship that crackles with I-can-do-anything-better-than-you rivalry and flashes of contagious genius.

"After Matisse's death in 1954, Picasso told his friend Roland Penrose that his rival had 'left me his odalisques as a legacy, and this is my idea of the Orient, though I have never been there.' Two months later Picasso got down to exploiting Matisse’s legacy in a series of 15 variations on Delacroix's Women of Algiers, a painting in the Louvre greatly revered by both artists. 'Yes, he is dead,' Picasso said, in acknowledgment of Matisse's presence in these works. 'And I, I am continuing his paintings.' Three of the finest Women of Algiers, After Delacroixs are in the current show, and, according to John Elderfield, they constitute 'a sort of imagined collaboration with Matisse just as much as with Delacroix; or, rather, an imagined collaboration with Matisse on the subject of Delacroix.'

choi

---------------------------------text
Artists have many muses. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), who took possession of everything that moved him, found inspiration in artworks, memories, myths, places and lovers—reinventing his own work as much as that of other masters. Oftentimes, as with his long love affair with Eugène Delacroix’s two paintings of the same subject, “Women of Algiers in Their Apartment” (from 1834 and 1849, respectively), unraveling Picasso’s interwoven passions is nearly impossible.

In 1831-32, Delacroix (1798-1863) toured Morocco. A visit to a sultan’s apartment (harem) in Algiers inspired Delacroix’s two paintings, whose emotionally driven color laid the foundations for European Modernism. Each includes a reclining odalisque, two seated women around a hookah, and a female Black servant. The life-size figures in the 1834 version, twice as large as the 1849 painting, are equally illuminated, up-close. The 1849 version, darker and less distinct, is spatially deeper yet friezelike. Mysteriously dreamy, bathed in bronze light, its somnolent women appear like memories summoned in a post-coital fog.

Beginning in 1940, Picasso drew regularly at the Louvre from Delacroix's "Women of Algiers" (1834). But from Dec. 13, 1954, to April 14, 1955, Delacroix’s “Women” overtook him like a fever. Obsessed, Picasso, age 73, produced a monumental series of transformative variations on Delacroix’s two paintings: 15 canvases (seven of them large), numerous drawings and a set of lithographs. A cinematic tour-de-force, the paintings—employing Cubist structure, grisaille and flat primary colors; and drawing from the well of art history—freely break down, combine and re-envision Delacroix's originals.

Theories abound regarding Picasso’s sudden lovesickness over Delacroix’s “Women.” One was the recent death of Henri Matisse. Picasso once jokingly remarked that “When Matisse died, he left his odalisques to me as a legacy,” meaning he now felt not only entitled but obligated to revivify Matisse’s signature image. Others include the onset of Algeria’s war of independence and Picasso’s budding relationship with his future wife Jacqueline Roque, who looked exactly like one of Delacroix’s Algerian harem women. But nothing prepares you for Picasso’s journey itself.

“Picasso & Les Femmes d’Alger” (“Picasso & The Women of Algiers”), an exhibition at the Museum Berggruen at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (through Aug. 29), puts Picasso’s series in context. It reunites nine of Picasso’s 15 “Women of Algiers” canvases (labeled “A” through “O”), numerous drawings, prints and related artworks with Delacroix’s 1849 version of “Women.” (A virtual tour of the show is being rolled out in stages on the Berggruen Museum’s Instagram and the Nationalgalerie’s YouTube channel. The introduction is already available and the remaining episodes will be posted July 3, 17, 31 and Aug. 14.)

In his essay “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large” (1972), the art historian Leo Steinberg reminds us that Picasso envisioned the figures in Delacroix’s two paintings as malleable muses in Picasso’s evolving story. “What roused Picasso to emulate Delacroix,” Steinberg wrote, “was not the harem subject itself, but a peculiar maneuverability which he found built into the task.” The interrelationships—between Delacroix’s two pictures; among their eight women; and in the influential dialogue between Delacroix and other artists—provided Picasso freedom, entry. Picasso didn’t make mere homages or copies of Delacroix’s paintings, but commingled explorations—profound meditations on the nature of art, influence, tradition, metamorphosis and creativity.

Picasso’s imaginative approach to Delacroix’s theme allowed him to transpose and reinvent; to move fluidly forward and back, not just between Delacroix’s two paintings but among centuries, styles, artists, space and time. In paintings “A” through “F,” Picasso familiarizes himself with the women and room. He diagrams, color-codes, regroups and re-emphasizes them. He puts women to sleep; undresses them; passes the hookah; adds bowls of fruit; and conflates, invents and moves figures and doorways. In “C,” an eroticized frenzy, he merges haloed-woman and doorway into a phallic form also suggesting Cycladic idol, cactus plant, vulva and lighted candle.

In other versions, Picasso converses as much with Byzantine Madonnas, Diego Velázquez, Rembrandt, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, African art, Paul Cézanne and Matisse as he does with Delacroix’s women—some of whom, androgynous, flit between female nudes and male Greek gods. And in the two Cubist, grisaille portraits, “G” (depicting the standing servant) and “L” (a Matissean seated odalisque), Picasso sets single figures free.

Throughout the “Women of Algiers” drama, Picasso—forever interrogating, fantasizing—pushed himself and his pictures into new realms. Exhibitionist and voyeur, viewer and creator, Picasso inhabited as he generated the figures. He wrestled not just with art and influence, naturalism and distortion, but with the nature of the sacred and profane.

In versions “A” through “N,” we sense Picasso searching, remaking, conflating—flexing his creative muscle. In “O,” his final symphonic series canvas, everything resolves. It is immediate, revelatory. Here, space and form, faceted, are continual, synthetic. The glimmering, seated odalisque—hovering, jewel-like, smoking the hookah—is frontal and emblematic. Reborn—no longer Matissean—she presides like a goddess, as the other figures and interior flow out of her like a kaleidoscopic vision. Delacroix’s two paintings, transcended, seem to float somewhere beyond Picasso’s “O,” like ancestral memories dreamed by these newfound women of Algiers. Picasso, the artist, steps aside. And Picasso’s muses, liberated, take possession of the stage.

—Mr. Esplund, the author of “The Art of Looking: How to Read Modern and Contemporary Art” (Basic Books), writes about art for the Journal.