Tag Archives: London Museums

The National Gallery London – Picasso and Ingres

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‘Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal.‘
Pablo Picasso

The National Gallery London where I just visited the stunning Raphael exhibit is hosting for the first time, Pablo Picasso’s ‘Woman with a Book’ (1932) from the Norton Simon Museum, California. It will be paired with the painting that inspired it, ‘Madame Moitessier’ by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.


Picasso first encountered the enigmatic ‘Madame Moitessier’ at an exhibition in Paris, in 1921, and was enthralled. Over the next decade, he repeatedly referenced Ingres in his art, and painted ‘Woman with a Book’, one of his most celebrated portraits, in homage to Ingres’s famous work.

For Ingres, a 19th-century French artist steeped in the academic tradition, the beautiful and 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.

Dominique Ingres - Mme Moitessier.jpg
Madame Moitessier is a portrait of Marie-Clotilde-Inès Moitessier begun in 1844 and completed in 1856 by 
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Picasso, born 100 years after Ingres, is famous for a very different, abstract, style of art, but his inspiration is clear. The model for ‘Woman with a Book’, Picasso’s then young mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, mimics Madame Moitessier’s distinct pose. The painting balances sensuality and restraint, striking a chord with the eroticism latent beneath Ingres’s image of bourgeois respectability.

‘Picasso Ingres: Face to Face’ is a unique opportunity to see these two portraits, side by side, for the first time, and to trace the continuous thread between 19th and 20th-century artistic development.

Exhibition organized in partnership with the Norton Simon Museum, California.

From The National Gallery Press

Love, Fame, Tragedy

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Tate Modern Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy is one of the most important shows Tate Modern has ever staged. Taking visitors on a month-by-month journey through 1932, a time so significant in Picasso’s life and work that it has been called his ‘year of wonders’.

The EY Exhibition Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy is one of the most significant shows the gallery has ever staged. Taking visitors on a month-by-month journey through 1932, a time so pivotal in Picasso’s life and work that it has been called his ‘year of wonders’. More than 100 outstanding paintings, sculptures and works on paper demonstrate his prolific and restlessly inventive character. They strip away common myths to reveal the man and the artist in his full complexity and richness.

1932 was an extraordinary year for Picasso, even by his own standards. His paintings reached a new level of sensuality and he cemented his celebrity status as the most influential artist of the early 20th century. Over the course of this year he created some of his best loved works, from confident colour-saturated portraits to surrealist drawings, developing ideas from the voluptuous sculptures he had made at his newly acquired country estate.

The exhibition offers an unique opportunity to view some of the most important works Picasso ever made. It includes three dazzling paintings featuring the artist’s lover Marie-Thérèse Walter. Made over the course of only five days Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, Nude in a Black Armchair and The Mirror, have not been shown together since they were created in 1932. For the first time in 85 years they are reunited alongside iconic works such as Girl Before a Mirror, Rest, Sleep, The Dream and many more.

Curated by Achim Borchardt-Hume, Director of Exhibitions with Nancy Ireson, Curator, International Art, Laura Bruni and Juliette Rizzi, Assistant Curators, Tate Modern

The exhibition is organised by Tate Modern in collaboration with Musée national Picasso-Paris where it will be curated by Laurence Madeline, Curator

8 MARCH – 9 SEPTEMBER 2018. Tickets on line now.

Private visits, let us know!