Picasso // Ingres
Added 2025-04-06 14:01:22 +0000 UTCIngres: “The nude is the most difficult thing to do in painting, for you must balance between what is true and what is ideal.” // "It is essential to study the human figure, for it is the source of all beauty." // “Drawing is the probity of art” (The word "probity" refers to honesty or integrity, implying that for Ingres, drawing was the core foundation of art—something that held absolute truth and integrity in the artistic process. For Ingres, skillful drawing was a sign of an artist's discipline and mastery, especially in rendering the human body).
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) Ingres was a Neoclassical artist who believed deeply in the importance of drawing, especially the classical nude. He considered figure drawing a cornerstone of artistic training, focusing on the precision and idealization of the human body. For him, the nude was a representation of perfect beauty and a study of idealized forms rather than realism.
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Picasso’s approach to figure drawing and the nude was deeply influenced by his break from traditional forms, especially as he moved from Classical to Cubism and Surrealism. He viewed the human body not as a fixed, idealized form but as something that could be interpreted in many different ways. Throughout his career, Picasso engaged with the classical nude but often used it as a means to experiment with abstraction, distortion, and perspective.
Picasso: "The most important thing is to keep the human figure alive, and to keep it ever-changing." // "In art, the style is the outcome of a mind which has seen something that others cannot see." // "I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them."
Comments
I've thought a lot about Ingres's contradictions. "It is essential to study the human figure, for it is the source of all beauty," but the "nude was a representation of perfect beauty and a study of idealized forms rather than realism." So for Ingres, the nude was beautiful but clean geometry was more beautiful. The nude was a starting point for his distortions of form to a kind of mathematical clarity, and for him the trick was how to impose geometric idealization on the form and maintain both its beauty and its believability. You would think someone like that would be uninterested in psychology but his portrait of the Chouan Rochejaquelin (https://www.artisoo.com/OilPaintingBlog/the-portrait-of-the-chouan-rochejaquelin/) shows such psychological perspicacity that maybe the reason he was interested in idealized form is because he had had enough of people. Picasso, I get the impression he was not interested in individuals, he was playing with art history and art theory. That for Picasso the figure was not problematic because to him it might as well be a wine bottle, it was an object, and he abstracted everything the same.
Shelah Horvitz
2025-04-07 11:39:53 +0000 UTC
