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TWO ARTISTS, TWO PORTRAITS, TWO WOMEN
TWO ARTISTS, TWO PORTRAITS, TWO WOMEN
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This exhibition displays two portraits of women by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Jean-Auguste. Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) side by side for the first time: Picasso's Woman with a Book, on loan from the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, and Ingres's Madame Moitessier, from the National Gallery's collection.
In viewing the paintings of Ingres and Picasso in parallel, we are presented with the opportunity to explore the influences and inspiration behind the works. Madame Moitessier adheres to conventions of portraiture at the time, but it is elevated by subtle and fine details, such as the clever double image. It was acquired by the National Gallery in 1936 - coincidentally the same year that Woman with a Book was first exhibited. The connection between the two works was first noted by the French critic Georges Duthuit (1891-1973), who wrote a short essay in 1936 about the boneless hands of both figures and the role of mirror reflections in both paintings.
Picasso was not afraid to openly appropriate the work of other artists. After his exhaustive experiments with Cubism, he was eager to look at new sources of inspiration. This led him to Ingres. Picasso first encountered Madame Moitessier at an Ingres retrospective in Paris in 1921. The painting lingered in his imagination for 11 years until he created Woman with a Book, which uses a similar composition to form a bold, abstracted version of the work, flattening space and transforming delicate floral patterns into bright, layered block colours. The direct and confrontational allusion to Ingres encourages the viewer not only to engage with Picasso's inspiration for his subject, but also to consider art-historical traditions and how a portrait can capture personality.
Ingres was a leading figure of the French Neoclassical movement. He considered himself to be primarily a history painter, but is now famous for the highly detailed, exquisitely painted portraits he made over the course of his career. Madame Moitessier, born Marie Clotilde-Inès de Foucauld, was the wife of a wealthy merchant, Paul-Sigisbert Moitessier. The opulent painting, completed in 1856, has long been seen as encapsulating the extravagance of Parisian high society during the Second Empire.
Picasso's Woman with a Book (1932) depicts the artist's young lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter. He met her in 1927 on the streets of Paris, where he was immediately struck by the 17-year-old's "interesting face'. After this encounter, Walter regularly modelled for Picasso. The 45-year-old artist soon entered into a relationship with her, despite being married to the ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova (1891-1955). Painted in 1932 one of the most innovative and productive years of Picasso's career, when he had his first large-scale retrospective exhibition - Woman with a Book was directly inspired by Ingres's Madame Moitessier, which Picasso had seen some years earlier. It shows how a love affair radically changed the way Picasso approached portraiture.
Together, Woman with a Book and Madame Moitessier give us a glimpse into portrait-making - a genre that not only reveals information about the sitters but also about the painters themselves.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867)
MADAME MOITESSIER
1856
This portrait was commissioned to celebrate the marriage of Madame Moitessier (1821-1897) to the older businessman Paul-Sigisbert Moitessier (1799-1889). Ingres was reluctant to accept the commission, but changed his mind after meeting the beautiful 23-year-old. He began the painting in 1844 but did not complete it until 1856 - slow even by Ingres's exacting standards. Originally the artist intended to show Moitessier's young daughter on her lap, but as years passed, the child grew too big and she disappeared from the painting. Around 1855, the dress, which was previously yellow, became flowered silk to reflect changes in Parisian fashion. Its colours perfectly complement the luxurious surroundings: a plush armchair, silk hand-screen and Japanese vase.
By combining contemporary Parisian clothing and interiors with classical reference (Moitessier's right hand imitates an ancient Roman wall painting of the goddess Arcadia), Ingres seemingly elevates this middle-class woman to the rank of a goddess. Her image can be seen once again in the mirror behind her, where the artist deliberately manipulates pictorial space to offer us a unique double portrait
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)
WOMAN WITH A BOOK
1932
In an intimate, sensual scene, Picasso depicts his muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter (1909-1977), a constant presence in his art and life from 1927 until the mid-1930s and the mother of his daughter, Maya (b. 1935). The night-time setting, reflecting their affair, is contrasted with the bright colours that illuminate Walter. Her dress is made up of large expanses of flat colour and patterns, typical of Picasso's style during this period.
Seated on an armchair with her right hand on her face, Walter re-enacts the pose of Ingres' Madame Moitessier. In this portrait, however, Picasso paints his beloved's face in profile and full-face simultaneously. The distinctive shape of Walter's nose reappears in Picasso's other portraits, illustrating his fascination with her face. The reflected image on the right also echoes Ingres's portrait, and the androgynous profile is that of either Walter or of Picasso himself. The fan in Moitessier's left hand is here substituted with an open book.
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