Are you in Paris? Will you be in Paris around March 17 – June 21 2004? If so be sure to stop by at Reunion des musees nationaux and check out an exhibition currently on show "Picasso Ingres", featuring over 120 works by both artists.



"With time, and extensive research on both artists, we have ended up understanding the bizarre aspects of Ingres, his pernicketiness, the stubborn revolution he led in the midst of his peers to impose his distortions, his sense of spatial organisation, his obsession with perfection… Likewise, we have a better grasp today of the debt that Picasso’s work owes to tradition and a certain form of classicism.

Picasso kept Ingres’ example before him throughout his life. Better still, he followed it, interpreting and sometimes copying his work, to the extent that Jean Cocteau called him “a real Mr Ingres”. He even went through an “Ingres period” (1915-1925).”

Looking beyond this obvious connection, the exhibition brings out the infinite variety of ways in which Picasso understood Ingres’ originality, and explores parallels between their oeuvres. By comparing paintings and drawings by Ingres and Picasso (some of which have never been exhibited in Paris before), it shows that the artistic approach of the two painters is often very close, characterized by daring formal approaches and remarkable inventiveness and power of expression."


Full Exhibition Information