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CHRISTINE LINDEY recommends a National Gallery’s inventive pairing of two canvasses, one by an inspired traditionalist and the other by a restless innovator
(L to R) Madame Moitessier, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1856; Woman with a Book, Pablo Picasso, 1932
[National Gallery]
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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.
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