Nice France

It's pronounce Nice, not nice, but it is a nice city in France. Can you hear the difference just by reading that? OK, think niece if you don't know how to pronounce it.

One nice thing was that the flights cost $112 per person round-trip from Algiers, which is very nice (think Borat for how to pronounce that) for a weekend away on a one and a half hour flight.

Here's some pictures from the weekend including various art museums that were partially closed. The modern art museum recently started major renovations and will be closed for years, so we missed that as well. However, it was still a very pleasant trip to a cool French city.

Marc Chagall Museum

Matisse Museum

A good bit of the Matisse permanent collection was on loan to Japan, so there was a curated exhibit of lesser works including outside art by a French artist with Algerian immigrant parents. Djamel Tatah presented many of these as a collection called Solitary Figures in the past, but I thought there was a sign saying something about the Women of Algiers. That part stuck in my mind since we were vacationing from Algiers.

However, a quick Google search only showed me Matisse with one painting called Algerian Woman (L'Algérienne). The Women of Algiers (Les Femmes d'Alger) is a series from Picasso depicting harems, which have nothing in common with the Algiers that we know. Picasso's paintings are based on two paintings by Eugène Delacroix titled Women of Algiers in their Apartment (Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement), which depict a harem that the artist saw in 1832, so apparently there were harems in Algiers. I digress since these huge paintings have nothing to do with that other than they're one of the many connections between France and Algeria.