Picasso Ingres: Face to Face
In 1844, the French painter Ingres Jean-Auguste-Dominique was offered a commission to paint Inès Moitessier, “the new young wife of a high-society banker”, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. Initially, he showed no interest – but when they met, her “Junoesque appearance” persuaded him to accept. The resulting portrait was an “astonishing” work that elevates its subject from “living woman to Roman sculpture”. Nearly a century later, Pablo Picasso used the image as the basis for his similarly epochal Woman with Book (1932), a “post-cubist” likeness of his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter in “exactly the same pose”. Now, for the first time, this “great” (and free) exhibition at the National Gallery brings the two paintings together, highlighting the “parallels” between the two as well as the discrepancies.
Ingres paints Madame Moitessier as “an opulent figure”, said Melanie McDonagh in the London Evening Standard. Her finger is raised to her temple, “not so much supporting her head as indicating repose”. Her expression is “enigmatic”, her frock adorned with a “riotous floral pattern”. Picasso, who first saw the painting in 1921, was evidently impressed. Yet where the original displays “latent sensuality”, his work was a portrait of “unselfconscious sexuality”: the palette is “a riot of bold, brash colour blocks”, his mistress’s bare breasts rendered as “white orbs with scarlet nipples”.
Both Moitessier and Walter were 23 when their portraits were begun, said Jackie Wullschläger in the FT. It took Ingres 12 years to finish his, in the course of which “France changed from monarchy to republic to empire, endured revolution and a Napoleonic coup”. He persevered because he believed his subject represented his “long-sought ideal” – as, for Picasso, did Walter’s “mobile, muscular features, blank expression, athletic body” and “blonde bobbed hair”. Although this show contains just two pictures, it is as “thought-provoking” as any blockbuster. Picasso Ingres: Face to Face is at the National Gallery until 9 October.