Ingres was no 'Ingres' either in many ways. Although he preached the classical verities, he relentlessly flattened the space in his best pictures like an Italian medieval painter, or like Picasso in 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.' There is the famous Ingres 'Grand Odalisque' with a face that is a flattened combination of profile and three-quarters view (eerily presaging Picasso's portraits) and the anatomically wrong five extra vertebrae. The pose is also impossible for a human being to assume and looks it. When Ingres was most enamored of tradition, as in his 'Apotheosis of Homer' or 'The Vow of Louis XIII,' he was sugary, sentimental and boring. His most powerful paintings are those like his portraits and nudes where the space is flattened into seeming relief rather than sculpture in the round. These are full of energy and are prescient of the spatial flattening in modern painting, where the formal primacy of the flat picture plane came to be widely asserted.

While Picasso is no Ingres, there are a few unfairnesses in the article. A better sample of some of the mid-1910s drawings would show that Picasso was actually aware of -- and drew carefully -- the bone structure and 3-d outline of the figure (since we see binocularly but are trying to draw 2-d, a good artist gives the feeling of roundedness in his or her lines), which is not what you would get from Bargue. It's also not clear that Picasso was all that absorbed in the gradients of light and shadow, which you would think would be part of the "takeaway" of the so-called photographic approach -- no one has ever suggested Picasso was a painter of light and shadow. It is interesting (as the author intimates) that Picasso did have an entry into what we would now call Gestalts -- he can evoke the human face and body from the slightest cues, which is part of his enduring power. This is obviously a mixture of the Spanish romanesque, icons, Africa, Cezanne, etc. It would be interesting to work out in more detail why this was so. In the current exhibition in Toronto there is reference made to a recurring dream Picasso had of his body parts getting huge and then getting small, and the same happening to others.