Even if you let your husband cut your hair during Covid, would you permit him to paint your portrait? Would you serve as his model?

Or a better question might be “how WOULD you paint your wife? What would the portrait say about you, about her, and about your relationship?

The event that inspired this blog was walking into a room of Rembrandt’s paintings in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and turning my head to “Saskia”, or Saskia van Uylenburgh, Rembrandt’s wife.

The intimate painting is 24 5/8 x 19 5/16, oil on panel, not very large when compared with others in the Rembrandt gallery. The painting was begun in 1634-35 and finished 1638-40. What does the gap say, and what does the painting tell us about Saskia?

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) was from a patrician family in Leiden. By 1632 (age 26) he was already an established artist in Amsterdam. He moved into the home of the art dealer, Herdrik van Uylenburgh who happened to be Saskia’s cousin. Rembrandt and Saskia met.

In 1634 they were married. She was 21. He was 28.

This portrait was started soon afterwards. Saskia bore four children. Only Titus survived past infancy. She died in 1642, 8 years after she and Rembrandt married. Perhaps the late completion date of the portrait related to her declining health, or other portraits of her in-between – or the interruption could have been a string of commissions for Rembrandt. We don’t know.

Looking at this portrait of Saskia (there were many), we see a slightly flushed strawberry blonde studying Rembrandt as he paints her. She emerges out of darkness. Her gaze is watchful, warm, tender, with full lips, slightly pursed, glowing skin and fashionable dress with a lace collar, a gold chain and a transparent veil over her head that glimmers with the light that only Rembrandt can convey. Rembrandt has described his love for her – respectful, intimate and tender.

Rembrandt also had some fun dressing Saskia (and himself) as different characters.

Saskia in Arcadian Costume, 1635, oil on canvas, 48×38, National Gallery, London

Saskia is portrayed as Flora, the Roman goddess of fertility and Spring, carrying a bouquet of spring flowers and wearing a necklace and headband of flowers and leaves, pearl earrings and a staff wound with woodland leaves.  She is 23 years old and pregnant for the first time.

The dress of silk and brocade is Renaissance fashion – one of many costumes in Rembrandt’s collection. Saskia, as in the small portrait, looks to her artist/husband as if about to speak. Their frivolous happiness and joy is evident.

Now, looking at a different approach(s) to painting your lover, mistress, muse or wife, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) made a life’s work of studying and capturing, sometimes abusively, his women who not only bore his children but inspired his art, especially the Cubist and Surrealist periods. There were many: Olga Khokhlora (Paulo) his first wife; Marie-Thérese Walter (mother of Maya), Dora Maar, Francoise Gilot (mother of Claude and Paloma), Jacquline Rogue (his second wife) – most of them overlapping and replacing the previous lover/muse – Picasso entangled with others in-between.

Portrait of Dora Maar, oil on canvas, 36×26, 1937, Musée Picasso, Paris

Dora Maar, a Spanish speaking Yugoslavian photographer, was 29 years old in 1936 when she met Picasso in Paris. She frequented the Surrealist circles of Picasso’s contemporaries and was also known for her volatility and leftist politics. The 55 year-old Picasso fell in love with her and lived with her for 9 years, through the Spanish Civil War, while continuing his relationship with the previously bedded and still supported Marie-Thérese Walter. This seated portrait portrays Dora as an elegant woman with fine jewelry and clothing, sparkling eyes, graceful hands with long pointed red fingernails, an Art Deco style jacket and the stylistic frontal plus profile distortion of her face (a Picasso hallmark) allowing Picasso to capture the two aspects of her personality, one being emotional instability. She is confined in the chair – Is she imprisoned or protected? Is she a little scary? Mysterious? Morticia Addams?

What do you imagine that Dora Maar thought of the portrait? Thrilled to be immortalized by Picasso, offended, furious, indifferent, unnerved or just hypnotized (as in drinking the Kool-Aid)?

Yikes.

Dora Maar was witness to Picasso’s painting Guernica, photographically documenting his progress. She served as the model for the grieving woman in Guernica and for the painting a year later, The Weeping Woman, fragmented, tormented, wrecked, slashed, broken, rearranged, unstable.

Picasso has exploited her vulnerable mental state.

Is that fair, presumptuous, unconscionable, or cruel? Picasso once said that “women are suffering machines”. A little misogynistic maybe ? And below another portrait of her, displaced, in a more of a Surrealist style.

Overlapping Dora Maar was Francoise Gilot who met Picasso in a restaurant when she was 21. He was 61 and still living with Dora Maar and dangling Marie-Thérese Walter and married to Olga Khokhlova.

Gilot was beautiful, magical, an intellectual, educated at Cambridge and the Sorbonne, and a painter having her first showing in Paris. She was independent of Picasso, yet in her 1964 memoir “Life with Picasso” she describes her 10 years with him as a “catastrophe that I didn’t want to avoid”.

Picasso described his years with her as years of joy. His palette was cheerful. Claude was born in 1947 and Paloma in 1949. Critics say that the portraits of her are his “Madonnas”. Picasso is quoted as saying “Women are either goddesses or doormats”. Notice that Francoise, also, is braced by the chair (fauteuil).

Francoise is painted in a Polish coat, a gift from Picasso, with her classic chignon hairstyle in his iconic Madonna pose. Oddly, Picasso was a self-professed Communist and atheist, but adopted the feminine frontal pose of Mary from Christian art for many of his portraits.

Picasso and Francoise never married. Their 10-year relationship ended because of his continuing infidelities. She walked away from him, taking the children. Picasso remained married to his first wife, Olga Khokhlova until her death in 1955. Francoise married twice, the last time to Jonas Salk AND she lived to be 101, dying June of 2023.

It was Jacqueline Rogue who won the lottery. There are over 400 works of her.

Jacqueline and Picasso met in 1953 at the pottery factory where she was employed and where Picasso was working in clay. He courted her with a rose a day for 6 months while he was still living with Francoise. In 1954 Francoise left and Jacqueline moved in. In 1961 they married.

Does Jacqueline have an Egyptian quality – think Nefertiti – the long neck, the heavy eyelid, the classical profile, dark eyes, dark eyebrows, “sphinx-like” quality, quietly bewitching? This portrait was done in 1954, just after Jacqueline moved in with Picasso. She also speaks “Chanel”, doesn’t she?

Flattering, don’t you think? Obviously meant to please.

Jacqueline provided unconditional emotional stability and contentment for Picasso in his last 20 years. She lived 13 years after Picasso’s 1973 death and helped create the Picasso Museum in Paris. She shot herself in 1986, age 59, and is buried beside of Picasso in Vauvenargues, France.

In the 1950s, America found itself the center of the modern art world after the roaring success of Abstract Expressionism and the relocation of avant-garde culture from Paris to New York. Following the Pop art period of the 60s that was inspired by commercialism, advertising, comics, and sculptural puns, a movement called “New Realism” exploded. This included the impressive and new “photo realism” (Richard Estes, Chuck Close, Alfred Leslie, James Rosenquist), “observational realism” (Janet Fish, Harriet Shorr, Philip Pearlstein) and “flat, generalized realism” (Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter)- all a reaction to the previous “decay” of classical motifs and technical skills. The one thing these works had in common was scale – almost always HUGE.

Alex Katz (b.1927) began giving the portrait a new language in the late 1950s when Abstract Expressionism had been the rage, but not his gig. He was inspired by his circle of friends, particularly his wife Ada Del Moro, a research scientist, who he met in 1957 and married 3 months later. He was also influenced by the large and generalized images of billboards and film. By 1958 he was painting Ada, exclusively for a while. His portraits can be described as “simplified, close-up perfection”.

Katz idealizes Ada, giving her a hypnotic expression. She seems introspective, an introvert, and important. Most of Katz’ paintings of her are very large, 6’x8′, or larger. There is no distance, no alarming detail, no drama. The images are clear and usually colorful. The paint is flat. A shadow is a shape and a slight change in value, not the blended tonality as in Renaissance chiaroscuro.

Above are two additional portraits of Ada and a photograph of Katz’ studio – a preview of scale.

Question: Does scale decrease intimacy or enhance it?

So, what would you say about Alex Katz’ portraits of his ONLY wife?

Adored? Immortalization?

She wears different dressings, but is the same quiet and serious muse – over 300 portraits of her in 60 years! You have to admire her dedication also, serving as his model.

They are both still living – in their 90s.

Another thought – What do you think of an artist who does 300 or 400 portraits of his wife?

is this dominance? obsession? possession?

So, back to the original question – would you allow your husband to paint you?

The next blog: Would you paint your husband?