At Tate Britain. I noticed people read the blurb and move on without looking at the art.

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The big hall at the Tate Britain

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Made in Paris, France as Spanish artist Pablo Picasso moved from his Blue Period to his Rose Period, the sitter appears in a thin white chemise whose strap slides off the near shoulder. Her build is slight and androgynous with a narrow chest, fine jaw, and long neck tapering to a delicate collarbone. Her dark hair is drawn into a low chignon. Her mouth is small, softly red; the eyelid and nose ridge are tenderly modeled. Cool light from the upper left flattens deep shadow, leaving planes of pale peach and cool blue to meet in quiet transitions. Firmer lines beneath her chin and at the temple hint at another figure under the surface that is stronger, sharper, and more boyish like a memory through skin. This canvas embodies a pivot from melancholy to warmth while keeping Picasso's Blue Period’s restraint. Technical study shows an earlier image, likely of a young saltimbanque (street performer) boy, over which Picasso re-drew, lengthening the neck, refining the jaw, and adding the chignon to transform gender and mood. The result is a poised, ambiguous presence: tender yet reserved, hovering between boy and girl, blue and rose, poverty and poise. Some identify the sitter as “Madeleine,” Picasso’s companion before Fernande Olivier; others say the evidence is inconclusive. That uncertainty makes this a portrait of becoming rather than being. In Montmartre around 1904–1905, Picasso pared his means to contour, thin veils of color, and small inflections of mouth and eye. “I paint forms as I think them,” he later said, a line that suits this metamorphosis: one body revised into another by vision and paint. The painting also reveals the young Spanish artist’s economy and restlessness with one canvas, two lives. The sitter’s identity may be uncertain, but the life around her is not: Picasso, just 23 years old, balancing hunger and ambition, testing how far a line and a wash of blue can carry feeling and how a portrait can hold the trace of who was there before.

Girl in a Chemise by Pablo Picasso (Spanish) - Oil on canvas / c. 1905 - Tate Modern (London, England) #WomenInArt #Picasso #PabloPicasso #art #artText #artwork #Tate #TateModern #PortraitofaGirl #BlueskyArt #ModernArt #OilPainting #chignon #bskyart #artbsky #ArtOfTheDay #TheTate #SpanishArtist

#TheTate “Then came the war. Picasso stepped back from this dizzying demolition of art as Europeans then knew it. Some people even blamed the war on the chaos of cubism. By 1918, Picasso participated in the “Call to Order” movement that hoped to restore civilisation with a more traditionalist art…

The sitter in this portrait is Emily Scoble, a model from the Slade School of Art in London. The famous Irish artist Sir William Newenham Montague Orpen was briefly engaged to her. The artist and another figure are reflected in the round mirror on a wall as the young Emily, dressed in elegant attire and wearing a hat, sits pensively in a dimly lit room, gazing intently towards us. Orpen was only 22 when he painted “The Mirror” and had just recently finished his schooling at the Slate School. The room is a portrayal of Orpen’s lodgings, but the shallow pictorial depth and decorative, or ‘aesthetic,’ arrangement of objects is based on Whistler’s famous portrait of his mother in profile. With her face partially obscured by the shadow cast by her hat, Emily's expression is calm as she turns in seated in profile to look directly at Orpen. Her hair is neatly pulled back, partially obscured by a light colored, wide brimmed hat with floral embellishments. She wears a cream-colored, long-sleeved blouse with soft, lace at the cuffs. Over this, she is draped in a heavier, light greyish shawl with a fringed edge, concealing lower portion of her black skirt. She is seated on a dark-colored chair and her pose is composed and still, suggesting a moment of quietness. The room is painted in subdued tones of dark browns, muted greens, and greys. The walls have a greenish hue, and there's a dark wood cabinet to the left. On this piece of furniture is a small, delicate glass vase containing a small bouquet of light blue flowers that seem to be slightly wilted. The wall behind the woman features several white framed pictures. A circular mirror on the wall reflects the artist painting at his easel alongside another person. This is a device which Orpen borrowed from a 15th-century painting by Flemish artist Jan van Eyck, "The Arnolfini Portrait." Emily was a frequent model for Orpen’s early works, but she broke off the engagement in 1901 and eventually married someone else.

"The Mirror" by William Orpen (Irish) - Oil on canvas / 1900 - Tate Gallery (United Kingdom) #WomenInArt #TheTate #Tate #SirWilliamOrpen #WilliamOrpen #Orpen #art #artwork #OilPainting #mirror #TateGallery #IrishArtist #PortraitofaWoman #EmilyScobel #MirrorArt #IrishArt #BlueskyArt #SladeSchool

The wonders of Anthony McCall and The Electric Dreams exhibitions at The Tate Modern #thetate #artgalleries

Hot snogs, fizz-fuelled city boys and a hilltop homage to Duran Duran: nine photos that capture the 1980s It was a tumultuous decade characterised by street riots, financial excess and big-haired bands making big-budget videos. As a major exhibition of shots from the 1980s prepares to open, we talk to the...

Great to see one of my favourite photographs picked up in the promo for #TheTate 1980s show.
www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

The Tate Gallery, London #WeekAforArt #Alphabetchallenge
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