Picasso Ingres: Face to Face

Arriving stateside after its inaugural presentation at London’s National Gallery, Picasso Ingres: Face to Face links two masters born almost exactly a century apart and sharing little in common at first blush. It took Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres 12 years of stop-and-start work to complete Madame Moitessier, the Second Empire portrait that inspired Pablo Picasso’s Woman with a Book, depicting his young mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter. The show pairs the works for the first time, allowing even casual observers to see Picasso’s debt to his predecessor in the sitter’s pose (itself borrowed from a Roman fresco) and the mirror behind her.