One Work: Pablo Picasso’s “Les Femmes d’Alger (Version L)”

On December 13, 1954, Pablo Picasso began painting a group of fifteen works featuring two or three languidly posed, vividly colored women accompanied by a servant. He said that this series, begun shortly after Henri Matisse’s death, paid homage to his fellow artist. But his canvases, collectively titled “Les Femmes d’Alger,” more closely resemble those portraying Algerian women by a third master from an earlier generation, Eugène Delacroix, and Picasso’s canv