Blue

Ingres painted this portrait of the Princesse Albert de Broglie in 1853 and for a long time it was the only painting I wanted to see when I went to the Met because it said less about museums and history than it did about the modern world. Although the Princesse is sitting (standing) and being memorialized, she is also her own creation, relaxed and sad in her life position, and unremarkable beauty. What Ingres made of all that Flaubert made something of as well in  “Madame Bovary,” and “Sentimental Education,” works that showed the female body no longer waiting for permission–even if it meant self-destructing. The Princesse is a body but she is also a dress, and the richness of her dress is a responsibility, not only for her, but for the many seamstresses and servants who have to help her maintain an appearance that Ingres does not romanticize, it is a burden in the way that wealth can be a joy and a burden. What I loved when I first saw the picture are her gloves and hat on the chair. While artfully arranged, they have the look of a woman who’s just arrived in a hurry to get somewhere else. Looking at Ingres work, I was drawn less to his gooey mid-eighteenth century pictures, than the incredible drawings of the eighteen-forties and social realist portraits such as his devastating 1832 study of Louis-Francois Bertin. There, Ingres began to throw up his own fashionableness and get down to work; he was more than a brilliant surface; he was acknowledging the world was as terrible as it was beautiful. The Princesse is terrible and beautiful, too, because she’s using the artist to be seen–his rendering is just part of her due. In a way, artist and model fuck with each other deeply in this picture: he is making his art while she does and does not give herself up to that idea as she makes herself.