A New Picasso Pairing in London Is Both Tiny and Titanic

A powerhouse pairing of two iconic portraits, one by Picasso and one resolutely French, has gone on display at London’s National Gallery in an exhibit that derives its strength from simplicity and some deft post-Covid logistics. The great Spanish painter’s 1932 “Woman with a Book” was flown to Britain on loan from its permanent home in the Norton Simon Museum at Pasadena to appear alongside a flamboyant portrait of Madame Moitessier by a 19th-century French neoclassical painter, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. The juxtaposition of the two masterpieces is a world first but also no shotgun marriage, because Picasso drew his inspiration for his famous portrait of his first big love, Marie-Thérèse Walter, from Ingres’s 1856 portrait. According to the National Gallery, Picasso first encountered the enigmatic “Madame Moitessier” at an exhibition in Paris in 1921 and was enthralled. Over the next decade, he frequently referenced Ingres in his art, and painted “Woman with a Book,” which is one of his most celebrated portraits, as an homage to Ingres’s famous work.For Ingres, an artist steeped in the academic tradition, the strikingly attired and conspicuously wealthy Madame Moitessier represented the classical ideal: Wearing her finest clothes and jewelry, she gazes at the viewer majestically, the embodiment of luxury and style during the Second Empire, the exhibition’s organizers note. Marie-Clotilde-Inès Moitessier was the wife of a prominent French banker, and “seated on her throne-like settee, is as coolly impassive as the goddess in the Herculaneum fresco on whom Ingres modeled her pose, hand on head, finger pointing to temple,” as the Financial Times notes.Picasso’s “Woman with a Book” strikes a similar pose, and though the Spanish artist’s characteristically colorful subject is brazenly if partially bare-chested, the painting “balances sensuality and restraint, striking a chord with the eroticism latent beneath Ingres’s image of bourgeois respectability,” as the National Gallery puts it. Whatever book Picasso’s muse clutches, she appears to be none too taken with it — perhaps not surprising, given the fixed gaze and stature of the artist who was portraying her. Another common denominator between the two works, beside the obvious one of achingly mysterious women inspiring two artists to grapple with and capture that mystique on canvas, is the queenly city of Paris, which the exhibition subtly reminds the visitor was, long before the multimillion-dollar deals at Art Basel, which is presently under way, the incubator of some of the world’s greatest works of art. During the approximately two years that saw travel restrictions between America and Britain due to the coronavirus pandemic, an art-world duet as monumental as Picasso and Ingres would likely have been consigned to the virtual. Now, as the Financial Times notes, “post-pandemic austerity and carbon demands will increasingly make such small shows the museum reality,” but this one illustrates that they can be “as rewarding and thought-provoking as blockbusters.”The exhibition runs in London until October 9 and will subsequently travel to the Norton Simon Museum in California.

A New Picasso Pairing in London Is Both Tiny and Titanic

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