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.
