On May 11 the auction house Christie’s hopes to brush past its previous world record for art sold at auction when Pablo Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger (Version “O”) goes on the block, with bidding expected to reach $140 million or more. The top lot at Christie’s Looking Forward to the Past sale in New York, the painting is the last in a series of 15—lettered “A” through “O”—that drew from 19th-century artist Eugène Delacroix’s studies of the same name. Departing from Delacroix’s French Romantic motif, Picasso’s …