Jacqueline Roque and the vindication of painting

Valencia,

In 1952, when he was at the height of his career and she was just over twenty-five, Picasso met the Parisian Jacqueline Roque in Vallauris; it would be their last relationship and coincided with a particularly fruitful period in the Malaga artist both in his paintings and his engravings (or it encouraged it).

Roque had settled in that town after a difficult first marriage, which led her to live in Africa; upon returning to France, she would begin to work in the Madoura ceramics (Suzanne Ramié), a workshop with which Picasso had been collaborating since the mid-forties. They married in 1961, the same year in which they decided to move to Mougins, where they both ended up dying (he in 1973, she in 1986, ending her life). Throughout this period, for almost twenty years, Jacqueline’s face became omnipresent in Picasso’s production, in infinite variations and reinterpretations of the theme of the painter and his model that this author cultivated, with more or less enthusiasm, in all his stages: her face appears for the first time in 1955, in plates dedicated to the variations of The women of Algiersby Delacroix, and Picasso would continue to recreate it afterwards, perhaps because, as the writer Hélène Parmelin stated, it had the qualities of a real woman: A total woman, a warm woman, a woman to laugh and play with and also to confront; a woman to live with her natural good and bad, a woman of painting.

She became, almost as Saskia was for Rembrandt, his obsessive model, although those qualities that we can appreciate in her were not only her own, but also those that they aroused in Picasso: the artist, a lover of himself, captured in these compositions the modulations of his desire, towards his wife and towards the act of painting itself. Ultimately, it was he who was exposing himself.

Picasso. Le peintre et son modèle de él I, 1963. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

This recurring presence of Jacqueline Roque in the last two decades of the author’s career (he appropriated her image up to four hundred times) is now being reviewed by the Bancaja Foundation at its Valencia headquarters, in the exhibition “Picasso and the model. Jacqueline’s profile”, which has been curated by Fernando Castro Flórez and Laura Campos Vicent and which has 250 works, including oil paintings, graphic works, drawings and illustrated books, always examples of his fondness for that theme of infinite derivations that is that of the artist and his model and also for the exploration of metapainting. They come from the Reina Sofía, from the author’s museums in Malaga and Barcelona, the ICO Foundation, ABANCA, the Guillermo de Osma Gallery and from the funds of the Bancaja Foundation itself, which has the largest collection of Picasso’s graphic production: the exhibition includes works by the Suite 347 and the Suite 156linocuts and illustrated books such as Carnet de la Californie, Le Carmen des Carmen and The ladies of Mougins.

Picasso. Jacqueline reading, 1957. Picasso Museum, Birthplace

Needless to say, his images dedicated to Jacqueline are not portraits, but rather creations in which her figure can again and again become the focus of reflections on identity, sex and representation: her profile is subject to numerous metamorphoses from very different perspectives, from primitivist to post-cubism, passing through a classicism with which he played without any pretension of academic achievement. In some of these pieces, he was influenced by his usual references, such as Courbet, El Greco, Velázquez, the aforementioned Rembrandt and Delacroix, Ingres, Manet, Van Gogh and Matisse. This motif, that of the artist and his muse, due to his long career and the originality of his own approaches, allowed him both to defend the revolution in contemporary painting, largely driven by him, and to engage in dialogue with the masters of the past who had also represented themselves at work and in front of their models, as well as to emphasize the possibilities of painting to nourish itself and to resist when other languages began to overtake it in recent art museums: in these works, the canvas, the pictorial space itself, becomes the protagonist from within and outside the painting.

The Valencian exhibition is completed with photographs by Edward Quinn and David Douglas Duncan that show both Picasso and Jacqueline Roque in the spaces where they lived and created, where the works collected, therefore, were born: in their residences in Cannes (California) and Mougins (Our Lady of Life).