Madame Moitessier, finger to well-known temple, sits again on her rose satin chaise, gown spreading like an overblown backyard round her. Chinese language porcelain, silk followers, rubies, pearls and ormulu frames: her boudoir is a hothouse of ostentatious wealth. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painted Inès Moitessier in Paris, the place she lived together with her wealthy banker husband, a widower 20 years older. However Inès herself is ageless and timeless and as marmoreal as her incongruous reflection within the mirror – the place she is elevated from residing girl to Roman sculpture.
Ingres’s astonishing portrait, to paraphrase a winded Baudelaire, sucks all of the oxygen from the ambiance. It is likely one of the oddest pictures ever painted by an artist supposedly identified for his superlative neoclassical precision. The arms are boneless, clean as alabaster and but one way or the other nonetheless supple. The raised hand is flaccid as a jellyfish. The naked physique, encased in all these metres of stiff, flowered silk, is sort of overwhelmingly fleshy, for all its marble perfection.
Ingres’s brush makes flawless work of each floor, from vibrant diamond to plumped cushion and polished enamel, however one thing is stirring under. It goes past commentary into appreciation, and even a sort of outright urge for food that appears about to interrupt by way of.
The Nationwide Gallery’s Madame Moitessier is the primary of the 2 portraits that make up this nice and tiny exhibition. The second, by Picasso, is straight based mostly upon it. Picasso came across Ingres’s portray in 1921, in an epochal retrospective the place the portrait was on public show for the primary time since its completion in 1856. A scholar of Ingres from first to final, all the time drawing from his classical perfection, Picasso held the picture in thoughts for greater than 10 years. His Lady With a Ebook was painted in 1932.
It reveals a lady in precisely the identical pose, finger to temple, seated on a chaise, her mirror reflection in simply the identical place on the proper. The room crowds round her, too. However that is pugilistic Picasso. The floor of the paint is fantastically thick and nubbed, nearly sculptural, in distinction to Ingres’s super-smoothness; the colors are ramped proper up into violent cyan and orange; the look is all post-cubist modernity.
And but to see them hanging collectively for the primary time, spotlit in a single darkish chamber of the Nationwide Gallery, is to see the parallels in addition to the discrepancies.
There's a story behind every portray. Ingres, in 1844, had no real interest in portray the brand new younger spouse of a high-society banker; not less than till they met, when he was so impressed by her Junoesque look that he accepted the fee. First, she gave start, and Ingres couldn’t deal with having the newborn within the image as requested. Then work was delayed by the dying of his personal spouse. At all times a despot together with his sitters, agonising for months over every pose, Ingres swithered between seated and standing, and finally painted Madame Moitessier upright in black silk first, earlier than lastly getting all the way down to the seated portrait, completed 12 years after the unique fee. By which period fashions had to date shifted that the yellow gown Madame as soon as wore had to get replaced with all this floral Lyon silk.
The portrait is commonly described as Ingres’s Mona Lisa: so visually obtainable and but so mysterious. Ingres runs all the best way from supreme materiality – the darkish glow of the rubies, the swing of the tassels on the bodice – to absolute inscrutability. Impervious, emotionless, monumental, Inès Moitessier is a Parisian sphinx; and she or he turns into an historical statue within the mirror. Her pose, and certainly her mirrored profile, are borrowed from the determine of a goddess Ingres noticed in an vintage mural in Herculaneum.
And what are the ladies of Picasso’s so-called classical interval, from the Nineteen Twenties onwards, if not descendants of this monumental goddess? Picasso is borrowing, likewise, from Ingres. The bodice slips, revealing each breasts. The fan is changed with an open guide. The Lyon silk is condensed and abstracted in flattened panels of vivid color. The reflection within the mirror is curiously androgynous; some have seen Picasso’s personal head right here. However look again on the Ingres, as this present emphatically invitations, and also you see a transcription of Ingres’s Madame Moitessier too.
The sitter in Lady With a Ebook is Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso’s secret lover over the last years of his marriage to the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova. There may be the actual palette he created for her – lavender, chalky inexperienced and a radiant pale pink that stands for her blond hair. And there are the voluptuous curves, the heart-shaped face (combining profile with entrance view), the oval eyes and the classical nostril. It's nowhere close to a recognisable likeness; however neither is the Ingres. They're portraiture at its most radical.
Each are echoes, or thefts, of various kinds. Each are closely preoccupied with the feminine presence. However Ingres’s relish of this majestic girl, his brush touching her physique on canvas, not less than, appears nearly harmless in contrast with Picasso’s vigorous moonlight-and-magic schmaltz.
The pairing of the 2 work slows the eyes and ask you to look nearer, to suppose tougher and longer about these alternative ways of portray (and considering). And the similarities – of measurement, pose, composition, situation and so forth – solely serve to stress the distinctiveness of every painter in flip. For me, it had the curious and sudden impact of constructing Picasso appear extra sedate, and Jean-August-Dominique Ingres far stranger.
Post a Comment