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Lot Essay
"One must paint like Ingres." — Pablo Picasso
From among the storied pantheon of nineteenth century masters, no painter captured Pablo Picasso’s admiration quite like Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whose elegant nudes would remain a guiding North star for the Spaniard throughout his oeuvre. In his final decade, Picasso firmly turned his eye once more to the art of the past, wholly embracing the grandeur and compositional clarity of his French predecessors. Le bain turc, with its undulating line and sensuous bathers, dates from this period of great reprisal, at which point Picasso fixated on Ingres’ own masterwork of the same title (Musée du Louvre, Paris).
Picasso, like many of his contemporaries, first saw Ingres' Le bain turc not on the hallowed walls of the Musée du Louvre, but rather at the 1905 Salon d'Automne exhibition, to which it had been lent by its erstwhile owner, Prince Amédée de Broglie. It was only in 1911 that de Broglie would sell the painting to the Louvre, where it would undoubtedly be frequented by Picasso for the better half of a century in spite of his constant search to stretch the very confines of representation itself.
Unlike many of Ingres’ lithe Neoclassical figures, whose solitary sinuous forms extend across the entirety of the composition, Le bain turc features a whole score of nude female figures, comprising a virtual catalogue of contorted poses from which Picasso, Henri Matisse, André Derain and others frequently borrowed and reworked. Vestiges of encounters with the corporeal figures of Ingres thread together Picasso’s idiosyncratic, if at times meandering, oeuvre like a throughline: commencing as early as 1907 with the epic Demoiselles d’Avignon (Zervos, vol. 2*, no. 18; The Museum of Modern Art, New York) to his own Neoclassical embrace in the wake of the First World War and, of course, the corporeal nudes which populated his canvases from the 1930s onwards. These paintings reveal the degree to which Picasso both appropriated and assimilated the classical, yet sensual, and voyeuristic character of Ingres’ own Le bain turc.
Picasso opened the year 1968 with a series of drawings focusing on the subject of the Turkish bath, each varying in its composition and appropriation of differing figures from Ingres’ painting. The theme would continue to compel Picasso throughout the year, as he executed several groups of drawings and etchings in bursts over its duration. The present work commenced the final set of three drawings executed on 1 November, and is the only work, apart from an etching (Baer no. 1786), to include the nude female lute player, whose source is the central seated figure in Ingres' painting. Using a continuous line of ingenious virtuosity, Picasso here revels in the felicities of rendering groups of nudes, in which varied poses dovetail with one another. The result is a rhythmical, intertwined ensemble of female figures, with the present drawing constituting the most refined example from the series. In spite of its Neoclassical source material, Picasso’s Le bain turc is nevertheless far from being a retrograde or atavistic reembrace of historical sources. Rather, in plundering the past, Picasso was able to remain firmly at the forefront of the post-war avant-garde and, what’s more, to establish himself as the great contemporary inheritor of European artistic tradition.
From among the storied pantheon of nineteenth century masters, no painter captured Pablo Picasso’s admiration quite like Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whose elegant nudes would remain a guiding North star for the Spaniard throughout his oeuvre. In his final decade, Picasso firmly turned his eye once more to the art of the past, wholly embracing the grandeur and compositional clarity of his French predecessors. Le bain turc, with its undulating line and sensuous bathers, dates from this period of great reprisal, at which point Picasso fixated on Ingres’ own masterwork of the same title (Musée du Louvre, Paris).
Picasso, like many of his contemporaries, first saw Ingres' Le bain turc not on the hallowed walls of the Musée du Louvre, but rather at the 1905 Salon d'Automne exhibition, to which it had been lent by its erstwhile owner, Prince Amédée de Broglie. It was only in 1911 that de Broglie would sell the painting to the Louvre, where it would undoubtedly be frequented by Picasso for the better half of a century in spite of his constant search to stretch the very confines of representation itself.
Unlike many of Ingres’ lithe Neoclassical figures, whose solitary sinuous forms extend across the entirety of the composition, Le bain turc features a whole score of nude female figures, comprising a virtual catalogue of contorted poses from which Picasso, Henri Matisse, André Derain and others frequently borrowed and reworked. Vestiges of encounters with the corporeal figures of Ingres thread together Picasso’s idiosyncratic, if at times meandering, oeuvre like a throughline: commencing as early as 1907 with the epic Demoiselles d’Avignon (Zervos, vol. 2*, no. 18; The Museum of Modern Art, New York) to his own Neoclassical embrace in the wake of the First World War and, of course, the corporeal nudes which populated his canvases from the 1930s onwards. These paintings reveal the degree to which Picasso both appropriated and assimilated the classical, yet sensual, and voyeuristic character of Ingres’ own Le bain turc.
Picasso opened the year 1968 with a series of drawings focusing on the subject of the Turkish bath, each varying in its composition and appropriation of differing figures from Ingres’ painting. The theme would continue to compel Picasso throughout the year, as he executed several groups of drawings and etchings in bursts over its duration. The present work commenced the final set of three drawings executed on 1 November, and is the only work, apart from an etching (Baer no. 1786), to include the nude female lute player, whose source is the central seated figure in Ingres' painting. Using a continuous line of ingenious virtuosity, Picasso here revels in the felicities of rendering groups of nudes, in which varied poses dovetail with one another. The result is a rhythmical, intertwined ensemble of female figures, with the present drawing constituting the most refined example from the series. In spite of its Neoclassical source material, Picasso’s Le bain turc is nevertheless far from being a retrograde or atavistic reembrace of historical sources. Rather, in plundering the past, Picasso was able to remain firmly at the forefront of the post-war avant-garde and, what’s more, to establish himself as the great contemporary inheritor of European artistic tradition.