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Visual arts round-up 2022 with Christine Lindey
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INSPIRED curating at the National Gallery managed to provoke a multitude of ideas by juxtaposing just two life-size portraits — Jean Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Madame Moitessier of 1856 and Pablo Picasso’s Woman with a Book of 1932.

The contrast between the arch-traditionalist and the quintessential modernist embodied the cultural and social change from France’s 19th-century bourgeois rule and values to the progressive ones of the first decades of the 20th century.

Ingres’s portrait being commissioned by her father-in-law, a minister of state, Picasso’s painting being a non commissioned portrait of his current young partner. Yet Picasso paid tribute to his predecessor by choosing to pose his sitter to echo that of Ingres’s portrait.

Liberation webinar, 30 November2024, 6pm (UK)
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