76cm x 61.0cm

A reproduction of  Picasso’s 1932 “Woman With Book” (SOLD)

In early 1932, Picasso painted a number of large canvases of women, brightly coloured and elaborately drawn in heavy dark lines which flow into great sweeping curves. His model for these paintings was his mistress, Marie-Therse Walter.

Among portrait painters of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso was the one most visibly influenced by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. It was from Ingres that Picasso could best harness, and then synthesize the linear abstractions and stringent realism subtly explored by the neo-classical artist, arriving at a careful balance that proved fundamental to the twentieth-century artist’s work.

In Woman with a Book the connection is made explicit. Basing his work on one of Ingres’s 1856 extraordinary portrait of Ines Moitessier, Picasso transforms the earnestness of the mid-nineteenth century sitter into a dreamy portrait of his current lover, Marie-Thrse Walter (1909 -1977). The chromatic riot and the web of thick black lines describing the simplified forms of both her bourgeois interior and her ripe sexuality contrast with the dreamy mystery of the sitter’s gaze. In so doing, Picasso has, to be sure, updated the genre highlighting at once the push and pull between realism and abstraction that lies at the heart of twentieth-century portraiture and of modern art over all.

The original painting by Picasso, measuring  approximately 30cm x 98cm, resides at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena California.