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Innovating through imitation: Pairing Picasso with Ingres may sound unlikely but as David Platzer discovers in an exhibition which has just moved from Paris to the Musee Ingres in Montauban, Picasso's admiration for the master of academic art was profound and life-long
Apollo, July, 2004 by David Platzer
Members of the public who think of Picasso as twentieth-century art's greatest innovator may be surprised to see him paired with Ingres, the nineteenth century's leading exemplar of academicism. Yet to anyone who has read a book about Picasso's art, the debt of the one to the other is known. The Musee Picasso, where this exhibition was originally shown, displaced part of its permanent collections, for the first time, to compare the two masters.
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Not everyone agrees. A painter friend visiting the exhibition's preview said that he almost never goes to museums for fear of being influenced and losing his originality. Picasso had no such worries. The exhibition's entrance includes a number of quotations on the subject from various sources, including one each from Picasso and Ingres. Ingres, assiduous student of antiquity, believed that 'it is in rending the inventions of others familiar that one learns oneself how to invent'. Ingres also copied a quotation from Montaigne into a notebook: 'Bees pillage flowers to make honey: it is no longer thym or marjoram afterwards. They transform and mix their borrowings to make something entirely new,' Picasso himself told his dealer Daniel Henry Kahnweiler that a painter is 'a collector who forms a collection by painting the pictures he loves in others' collections'.
Picasso's practice, like those of the honey-making bees, was to study, learn from and thoroughly assimilate the works of earlier masters and different artistic traditions, African as well as European, the better to create something entirely new. Always restless, he never stayed in the same artistic place for long. Yet he was always Picasso, even if he once described an exhibition of his earlier work as 'paintings by an artist who has the same name as me'.
Backstage at the Ballets Russes one evening in 1917, Ernest Ansermet, the Ballet's musical director, spotted a bowler-hatted Picasso murmuring 'Monsieur Ingres' to himself while looking into a mirror. Picasso's admiration for Ingres seems to have begun round 1905, a rime when he was already gaining recognition. Each year the Salon, in addition to new pictures by contemporary painters, included exhibitions by older masters whose influence remained strong. In 1904 it had been Cezanne, in 1905 it was Manet and Ingres. Manet was an obvious choice, but Ingres? All of modern art since the middle of the previous century had been based on rebellion against academicism and Ingres was the painter most associated with academicism. He was still being rehabilitated from his eternal stylistic duel with Delacroix.
Yet Ingres proved the hit of the 1905 Salon. Le bain turc (1865, Musee du Louvre, Paris) was shown for the first time to a large public, together with several preparatory studies. The three most important young painters of the day, Picasso, Braque, and Matisse, all fell under his sway. Marisse said that for his purposes, Ingres was more useful than Manet. As for Picasso, he made pilgrimages to the Musee Ingres in Montauban. Fernande Oliver, his companion at the time, remembered that Picasso studied the Primitives, El Greco, and Goya on his visits to the Louvre, but above all Ingres. Postcards on exhibit illustrate Picasso's enthusiasm. Le bain turc, with its numerous female nudes, each one a separate composition, yet all interlocking together, had a great influence on Picasso's 1906 Le harem (Cleveland Museum of Art) and that crucial landmark Les demoiselles d'Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York). A fascinating pen and ink study for Les demoiselles, from the Musee Picasso's collection, is on display here, together with numerous other sketches of Picasso's inspired by Le bain turc. Very different, but from the same period, was Picasso's Femme a l'dventail (1905, National Gallery, Washington), in which Picasso borrowed the motif of a solemnly raised right hand from Ingres's study for the Emperor Augustus in "Tu Marcellus eris' (c. 1812, Musee Ingres, Montauban) to give his young woman an air of hieratic gravity. Ingres was also integral to the development of Cubism, as Apollinaire noted in a review of a 1911 Ingres retrospective.
Ingres's influence followed Picasso throughout his career. Picasso, who could create a world with a few lines of the pen, began with a design just as Ingres had, adding his colours later. The exhibition includes a wall of portrait drawings with contributions by each of the two masters. In style they are similar, even if each series is unmistakably of its time. Picasso's may be more intriguing because his subjects--including Satie, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Bakst and Max Jacob among them--are of more enduring interest than Ingres's now forgotten nouveaux riches, but the skill with which Ingres brings his subjects to life is remarkable. Here is Ingres's sketch for the hard-faced Monsieur Bertin (1832), which Picasso used as a model for his own drawing of the gentle poet Max Jacob (January 1915, Musee Picasso, Paris), just as he had borrowed from Ingres's finished painting of the sitter (1832, Musee du Louvre) for his great portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
