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In the first few years of the 20th century, no artist seems to have fired Pablo Picasso's imagination quite so much as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Picasso attended retrospectives of Ingres's work and frequently visited the Louvre to study his masterpieces, such as "La Grande Odalisque" (1814) and "The Turkish Bath" (1862-63). He also traveled to the Musée Ingres in the French artist's hometown of Montauban to see his celebrated drawings.
Picasso's fascination with Ingres’s highly detailed portraits culminated with his 1932 oil painting "Woman With a Book," which borrowed many of its themes from Ingres’s high-society portrait "Madame Moitessier" (1844-56). "Picasso Ingres: Face to Face," opening June 3 at London’s National Gallery, will put these two paintings together for the first time. The exhibition is a collaboration between the National Gallery, which owns "Madame Moitessier," and the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., which is lending "Woman With a Book."
"What struck me immediately is the absolute difference of the surfaces of each painting," says Christopher Riopelle, the National Gallery's curator of post-1800 paintings. "Ingres's portrait is absolutely enamel-like without any sign of a brushstroke, whereas you can see Picasso has really poured on the paint and manipulated it to create something that is life a bas-relief."
Picasso first discovered "Madame Moitessier" at an exhibition in Paris in 1921. His artistic response wasn't immediate but ripened over a decade. "Picasso was a contemporary of surrealism and Freudian psychology," Mr Riopelle says. "He knew that things lay latent in your mind and that you had to be ready to just use them when they came roaring to the surface."
The Spanish artist had turned to Ingres for inspiration before. After marrying the Russian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova in 1918, Picasso began making neoclassical paintings that placed a premium on gestural expressiveness, having elegant women pose for him in chalky drapery. This style "was something that Olga did her very best to encourage," Mr Riopelle says. "She wanted to live as a high society figure, but this conventional side of Picasso soon ran it course [ie, ended]."
Picasso's work became more colorful and sexually overt in 1927, after he began a clandestine affair with 17-year-old Marie-Thérèse Walter. The artist made numerous paintings of Walter, including "Woman with a Book," the last in a series of large-scale portraits created for his first major Parisian retrospective in June 1932.
Walter's pose, seated in an armchair with her head resting on her hand, is an almost exact copy of Ingres's "Madame Moitessier," whose subject, Marie-Clotilde-Inès Moitessier, was a rich banker's wife. But Picasso has amplified the figure so as to underline the original's strangeness. Mr Riopelle suggests that Picasso was drawn to Ingres because of his propensity to "to exaggerate physiognomy and exaggerate clothing, which was something quite new and startling in 19th-century portrait painting."
In "Madame Moitessier," the subject's raised left hand looks curiously boneless, with fingers resembling a floppy starfish.During Ingres's lifetime, some critics noted the physical inconsistencies in his paintings, with one critic complaining that the woman's back in "La Grande Odalisque" was three vertebrae too long. But Ingres's unapologetic quest for a sinuous arabesque overturned rules of anatomy, which he called a "dreadful silence that I cannot think of without disgust."
Picasso's own corporeal distortions were legion, and he certainly appears to have been entranced by Ingres's boneless-seeming hand. His 1932 depiction of Walter as tentacled sea creature in "Naked Woman Reclining," which was sold by Sotheby's in New York earlier this month for $67.5 million, displays similar elasticity.
"Woman with a Book" went on display for the first time in 1936. In the same year, the National Gallery in London acquired "Madame Moitessier" for its collection. The coincidence did not escape the attention of the French critic Georges Duthuit, the first writer to observe that Ingres's painting was Picasso's source for the subject's distinctive pose.
"It seems to me that one of the things that Picasso was doing here with Ingres was allowing his subconscious feelings about Marie-Thérèse to come through." Mr Riopelle says. "This change to much more colorful and exaggerated figures coincides with both embracing surrealism and this organicism, which comes out of the voluptuousness of Marie-Thérèse herself"
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发表于 5-28-2022 12:31:45
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