Woman with a Book
1932
Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973)
Oil on canvas
The Norton Simon Foundation
© Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Among Picasso’s most celebrated likenesses of his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter, Woman with a Book balances sensuality and restraint, enclosing exuberant, thickly applied color in a network of sinuous black lines. The composition pays homage to the Neoclassical master of line, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whose work Picasso had admired since his youth, and whose Portrait of Madame Moitessier the Spanish painter had first encountered in 1921. Resting his model’s head on her hand, and replacing Madame Moitessier’s fan with the fluttering pages of a book, Picasso tapped into the eroticism latent beneath Ingres’s image of bourgeois respectability. The serene profile reflected in a mirror at right in Picasso’s portrait likewise references its Neoclassical precedent but may also constitute an abstract self-portrait.
Picasso Ingres: Face to Face
For years, scholars have noted the compositional similarities between Picasso’s Woman with a Book and Madame Moitessier (1856) by the 19th-century French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. In 2022–23, the Norton Simon Museum and the National Gallery, London, partnered to unite these two paintings for the first time in the exhibition Picasso Ingres: Face to Face. A virtual tour of the Norton Simon display by Chief Curator Emily Talbot offers viewers a closer look at the origins of each work, and the surprisingly indirect way that Picasso achieved his homage to Ingres’s great portrait.
