Picasso Ingres Face to Face
National Gallery, London
 

THE National Gallery displays side by side two larger than life-size portraits of a woman — Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s (1780-1887) Madame Moitessier of 1856 and Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) Woman with a Book of 1932.

Ingres epitomised and continued the French Academic tradition which began in the 17th century, while Picasso epitomised 20th-century modernism. Apart from their subject matter the paintings appear to have nothing in common. And yet…

Ingres’s portrait was begun in 1844 during the reign of Louis Philippe, four years before the 1848 revolutions which shook European aristocratic and bourgeois rule, but it was resumed and finished in 1856 during the bourgeois rule of Emperor Napoleon III.
 
Ingres had long championed the values of classicism which gained influence through his appointment as vice-president of the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris which attracted applicants throughout France and the Western world.

Although he shared the Academy’s belief in the hierarchy of subjects which placed History Painting at its pinnace (this being narratives from classical history, mythology and the bible), Ingres was destined to shine as a portrait painter despite his considering these to be merely bread and butter commissions.

In contrast Picasso had epitomised the radical avant-garde from the early 1900s, notably as the co-inventor of cubism with his friend Georges Braque.

Yet by 1932 when he painted Woman with a Book, he also was critically acclaimed and financially secure. And unlike Ingres’s portrait which was commissioned, Picasso chose to portray one of his partners, the working-class Marie-Therese Walter, who he had first met outside a Paris department store when she was just 17 and he was in his mid-40s.

With her distinctive nose which ran straight from her brow to just above her mouth like a classical sculpture, she would star in many of his paintings.

Picasso had long admired Ingres who was known for his emphasis on line rather than colour, yet he was exasperated by critical explanations linking his work with that of his predecessor, saying “As if Ingres were the only artist I ever looked at in the Louvre.”

Yet the sitter’s pose and composition of Picasso’s painting echo that of Ingres’s portrait. Marie-Therese sits in an arm chair, supporting her head with a single finger, suggesting Picasso’s artistic dialogue with his illustrious predecessor.
 
But whereas Ingres sought a lifelike likeness by rendering an illusion of spatial recession, surface textures of skin and fabrics, and anatomical proportions in accordance with neo-classical norms, Picasso expressed the essence of his subject through bold simplifications of form and expressive colour.
         
Marie-Therese has a moon-shaped head, her face changes colour from pink and white to green and lilac, her hair is pink and green, her neck and shoulders are green and her white breasts have vivid red nipples, whose eroticism is enhanced by being partially concealed in a lacy black bustier. Their eroticism is contrasted by the intellect of her facial expression suggesting that she is reflecting on the content the book in her hand.

In contrast Madame Moitessier holds a fashionable fan in her plump, limpid hand which denotes her social status as a bourgeoise who never works for a living. As does her apparently boneless body which implies that it contains nothing as vulgarly angular as a skeletal frame.

And whereas she engages our gaze with a fashionably complacent bourgeois sense of entitlement, Marie-Therese ignores us in a pensive, inner reverie. One looks outward the other looks inwards.

Yet Ingres also invested his sitter with an albeit subtler eroticism. Her dress’s deeply cut  and sleeveless bodice expose large amounts of flesh by 19th-century standards of propriety and it slips dangerously away from her left shoulder; while her gaze implies that she knows more about the facts of life than she would like to admit.

Both artists were critically and financially successful when they painted these works. Ingres had gained a high reputation as a portraitist and was in a position to refuse commissions, only accepting socially prestigious ones such as Madame Moitessier which was commissioned by her father-in-law who served in Louis Philippe’s ministry of state.

Her husband was a wealthy businessman 20 years older than her. She was what nowadays may be called a trophy wife — beautiful, from a socially “good” family, but destined through Ingres’s famous portrait to be known only through her husband’s name.

Ingres declared that drawing was “the probity of art” and his rivals the romantics denigrated him for only producing coloured-in drawings.

Although Picasso used bold, often unmixed colour in a thoroughly modernist way, he too was primarily interested in line and form. This links their works and explains Picasso’s respect for Ingres. One was an inspired traditionalist the other a restless innovator, yet both had aesthetic integrity.   

Until October 9, 2022 in Room 46. Free.