Pablo Picasso, Les femmes d’Alger, version L | Impressionist and Modern Art | Special Feature. Working in his Paris studio at 7, rue des Grands-Augustins, Picasso painted a series of fifteen variations on Delacroix's Les femmes d'Alger between 13 December 1954 and 14 February 1955. The individual canvases are designated as versions A through O. This was the first extended series that Picasso created after a renowned painting by a past master. It was an auspicious beginning. Two further important serial groups of pictures followed later in the decade: more than forty canvases after Velázquez's Las Meninas in 1957, and an even lengthier sequence in homage to Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe during 1959-1962. Les femmes d'Alger are surely Picasso's greatest achievement in the decades following the end of the Second World War. By alternating his approach between paintings steeped in color, and those rendered en grisaille, Picasso demonstrated the extraordinary breadth and depth, the sheer conscientiousness of his exploratory process--his "research," as he liked to call it.
Assia Djebar - Out of ALgeria. Picasso and Femmes d'Alger. Picasso’s series The Women of Algiers was started within a month of the Nationalist uprising in Algeria in 1954 which lead to the eight-year long Algerian War of Independence. France’s history and politics in the post-war period was closely tied up with its relationship with its colonies and their bid for independence. In the midst of these events Picasso made the link with Eugène Delacroix’s The Women of Algiers 1834.
His dialogue with Delacroix can be traced back to a number of early drawings from 1940 and the famous ‘Louvre’ test of 1946 in which Picasso directly juxtaposed his work with masterpieces in the museum. Picasso would have been drawn to Delacroix’s idea of the authenticity of antiquity in North Africa and to the relationship of Spanish culture to the period of Moorish domination.
The colours of Algeria were a great influence on Delacroix. Picasso explores colour throughout his series of paintings after Delacroix, also producing one monochrome version. Blog.lib.umn.edu/raim0007/RaeSpot/under wstrn eyes.pdf. Veiled Vision: Djebar on Art. Orientalism. Delacroix in North Africa. (Re)Envisioning Orientalist North Africa: Exploring Representations of Maghrebian Identities in Oriental and Occidental Art, Museums, and Markets By Isabella Archer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill In 1832 Eugène Delacroix journeyed to Morocco as part of a French ambassadorial delegation to the Moroccan sultanate.
The drawings, sketches, paintings, and notes Delacroix produced during and after his travels have had a lasting effect on the definition of what constitutes North African culture for both nineteenth- and twenty-first-century consumers. How exactly did nineteenth-century European paintings come to constitute authentic representations of Arab culture? Authenticity, ever a loaded term, is in the context of this article the description awarded to a custom or object (such as a painting) that is widely considered to be accurate representation of a culture’s traditions and identity.
Isabella Archer See Larger Image: Wikipedia See Larger Image: Wikipedia Or was it? Delacroix à Alger. Delacroix, Djebar and Les Femmes d'Alger. Delacroix - Google books. Delacroix - Femmes d'Alger. «Ce livre est né de la peur du noir.» Marie Darrieussecq | The Institute of Modern Languages Research. Biography Marie Darrieussecq was born on 3 January 1969. Her mother taught French literature at junior level and her father was a technician. She grew up in the small village of Bayonne in the French Basque country.
As a child she was an avid reader, drawing on her family’s library, which she claims included texts as diverse as the works of Tolstoy and the latest bestseller. At the end of her thesis, she referred back to her early years, in terms that suggest that the key themes of her texts were foreshadowed in her childhood imagination, ‘[D]ans mon enfance, il y avait des fantômes autour de moi, les miens, silencieux et présents’. Darrieussecq has claimed that she knew from the age of six that she wanted to be a writer. She wrote avidly and specialized in the study of literature from high school onwards. In 1988 Darrieussecq began her higher education in Bordeaux, studying among other cultural and critical theorists the theories of Roland Barthes.
Bibliography Truismes (Paris: POL,1996) Passion Simple. Definition of yuoangui. Cambridge Journals Online - Theatre Research International - Fulltext - The Spatialization of Loss in the Theatre of Marguerite Duras. Www.erudit.org/revue/etudfr/2003/v39/n2/007039ar.