The Brooklyn Rail

In January 1932, Picasso created a series of luminous portraits at his Château de Boisgeloup studio in Normandy that are among his most celebrated works. For the fifty-one-year-old artist, the paintings marked the start of a critical year—the subject of the 2018 Tate Modern exhibition Picasso 1932 – Love, Fame, Tragedy—and capture the vitality and erotic potency of his then-secret twenty-two-year-old muse and lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter. Beneath the surface beauty of these works, however, lies a deeper resonance. Focusing on three pictures, I propose that Picasso draws upon a Baroque model of Mary Magdalene, intertwining themes of sensuality, spirituality, and transformation.

According to medieval Christian legend, Mary Magdalene retreated to a cave near Aix-en-Provence after Christ’s death, where she engaged in prayer, meditation, and daily spiritual ascensions. The legend’s cultural impact spurred two notable theological studies in Paris in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Louis Duchesne’s La légende de Sainte Marie-Madeleine (1893), an article assessing the origins of the legend, was featured in Annales du Midi, a journal on southern France’s heritage, and later reformatted as a book (1901) by Éditions Alcan. Joseph Bérenger’s Sainte Marie-Madeleine en Provence (1925), a book on the veneration of Magdalene in Provence, was released by Pierre Téqui, a Roman Catholic publisher whose Latin Quarter shop served as a gathering place for intellectuals promoting Catholic revival to the modern world.

German Renaissance artists Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach the Elder made woodcuts depicting the legend now known as “Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy.” The saint is rendered as a classical Venus-type, draped only in her long hair as angles lift her heavenward. By the seventeenth century, the archetype evolved. Baroque artists Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi reimagined the ecstasy, blending the sensual with the spiritual: Magdalene is featured is in dark interiors, her body bathed in divine light, and her eyes closed in bliss, a pose saturated with eroticism. We see a similar approach in Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–52) where the Spanish mystic leans back with eyes closed and mouth open as a male angel points his spear at her heart.

When addressing Picasso’s Marie-Thérèse portraits from 1932, scholars generally refer to the influence of Henri Matisse and his odalisques—modern archetypes of semi-nude women reclining or lounging in richly decorated interiors—particularly given the important 1931 Matisse retrospective at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris.¹ Yet Picasso’s portraits, painted during clandestine encounters at his countryside retreat while his wife Olga Khokhlova remained in the couple’s haute monde apartment in Paris, echo the Baroque interpretations of Magdalene as well.

Start with Picasso’s La Lecture (1932). Marie-Thérèse sits in a chair with an open book and a white lily. Her reading paused, she appears absorbed in quiet contemplation, perhaps transported by what she has encountered on the page. The depiction may suggest the archetype of the Virgin Mary in the Annunciation, albeit without the pairing of an angel. And yet the open book, as a bible, can be associated with the visual model of the penitent Magdalene too, as in Titian’s The Penitent Magdalene (1565–66) and El Greco’s The Penitent Magdalene (ca. 1576–77), where the artists represent the transformation from sinner to saint.

In fact, La Lecture closely echoes El Greco’s picture. Picasso, known to study and collect photographs of El Greco’s work, may have seen a reproduction of The Penitent Magdalene, and likely was familiar with the artist’s other versions of the motif as well.² The open book and the tall lily in the Picasso correspond to the open bible on the rock and the ivy tendrils in the El Greco. The palettes resonate too: the lilac tones painted in and around Marie-Thérèse evoke Magdalene’s mantle, while the hazy blue recalls the soft, cloudy sky above her.

In this context, we can also observe a striking correspondence between La Lecture and Gentileschi’s Penitent Magdalene (ca. 1615–16) at the Palazzo Pitti, a work Picasso may have seen on his 1917 visit to Florence, if not also the engraving after it by Francesco Floridi (1837–42) or the photograph by James Anderson issued as a print in 1905. Just as Marie-Thérèse sits in a Renaissance-style armchair with its bright red upholstery and yellow brass fasteners, so too does Gentileschi’s Penitent Magdalene, in a chair with elaborate red silk upholstery and bright yellow studs. The curvaceous shapes of Marie-Thérèse’s arms and hands echo the opulent drapery of Magdalene’s gown, while both works share a similar palette, the yellow gold and white of Marie-Thérèse’s figure mirroring Magdalene’s brilliant garments.

Parenthetically, Picasso’s Sleeping Woman by a Mirror (1932), another portrait in the series, painted five days after La Lecture, appears to make another reference to the Gentileschi. In that picture, Picasso features a tall rectangular mirror behind the figure of Marie-Thérèse, and it leans back and to the right, as if the Gentileschi mirror in the same position that Magdalene pushes away to symbolize the rejection of vanity, earthly beauty, and the fleeting pleasures of the material world.

In Le Rêve [The Dream] (1932), the most famous painting of the portrait series, the model of Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy comes into focus, with the expression and posture once again merging the spiritual and erotic realms. Marie-Thérèse tilts her head to rest on her shoulder and the body sinks into an armchair, one breast exposed, the hands resting on her lap. The depiction brings to mind Annibale Carracci’s The Ecstasy of Mary Magdalene (1585–1600) at the Prado, where Magdalene’s body falls back, supported by two angels, with one hand on her lap and the other on a skull, a symbolic reference to the transience of life.

Marie-Thérèse’s dress slips off her shoulders, echoing the lowered gown of Carracci’s Magdalene.  The folds of fabric beneath Marie-Thérèse's fingertips evoke the lines of scripture in the open bible on the hewn rock in the foreground. Her pearl necklace corresponds to the long hair pooling softly at the curve of Magdalene's bosom, while her partially exposed right breast is a similarly geometric half-circle with a small, pert nipple. Finally, the chair’s arms suggest the flanking angels’ support, particularly the left angel, as Marie-Thérèse leans in that direction with the chair arm cupping her forearm. 

Le sommeil [Sleep] (1932) is another portrait of Marie-Thérèse in a languid, reclining position, in this case evoking Caravaggio’s Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy (1606). While the Caravaggio was lost at the time, it was widely known through replicas, including one at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Marseilles. Marie-Thérèse shares Mary Magdalene’s sensual surrender: her chin raised, mouth slightly parted, and head tilted to the side at a severe angle, with a pallid complexion evoking divine illumination.

Also note the high placement of Marie-Thérèse’s right breast, where we would expect a shoulder—it suggests the provocatively bare shoulder of Magdalene in the Caravaggio. The cloth lowered at Marie-Thérèse’s thighs, too, echoes the white chemise slipping off Magdalene at the shoulder. We can identify a more direct adoption of this concept in Le Rêve, where a white profile of Marie-Thérèse tilts back and rests on a protruding shoulder that is revealed by a lowered chemise, perhaps cross-referencing a similar feature in Titian’s The Penitent Mary Magdalene. We can even find a similar element in La Lecture as well, with the green shape at the left suggesting the shoulder.

Gentileschi’s Penitent Mary Magdalene (1625–26) offers a complementary point of comparison. Here, Magdalene sits in an armchair with her head tilted forward on a sharply bent wrist. According to art historian Jesse Locker, this composition was widely disseminated in Spain after the original painting arrived in Seville in 1626 and became readily available for copying.³ Well-known versions exist at Seville Cathedral and the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City, but Locker recently identified a painting purchased at an auction in Paris in 2001 and acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum in 2024 as the autograph original.⁴

Consider Marie-Thérèse’s left hand. Sitting high on her chest, the hand recalls the pose of Magdalene in Titian and El Greco paintings. Yet the top contour of the hand, running along the cheek, and the acute angle of the bottom contour, with the little finger bent to mirror a folded wrist, suggests a more direct reference to Gentileschi’s Magdalene. In that context, the black form that curves around Marie-Therèse evokes the arm of the chair at a three-quarter angle, while also echoing the angel supporting Magdalene in Carracci’s painting of Magdalene’s ecstasy.

Now turn to Picasso’s display of Marie-Thérèse’s bare sex, a pronounced feature of Le sommeil. It bears a striking resemblance to the crease of Gentileschi’s Magdalene’s naked left underarm, especially when we relate the cloth lowered across the thighs to the chemise lowered from the shoulder, as we similarly observed with the Caravaggio picture. The resonance aligns with the general view that Magdalene’s bare shoulder symbolizes the sexual aspects of her story; in fact, art historian Guillermo Tovar de Teresa refers to the underarm crease of Gentileschi’s Magdalene as an explicit allusion to her sex.

As a caveat, the reference to Magdalene’s underarm raises the question of where Picasso might have encountered the Gentileschi painting. In the Soumaya and Kimbell paintings, the underarm is exposed, but in the Seville version, it is concealed by an overpainted, wider scarf around the neck—likely added to appease religious prudery given the cathedral context (this overpainting was also present in the Kimbell painting prior to conservation in 2024). Our analysis therefore requires some speculation that Picasso saw a copy or some iteration of the original without the wider scarf, if not the original itself in its unadulterated state—unless he referenced the similar underarm in the Gentileschi at Palazzo Pitti, which is pronounced in the Floridi engraving.

If we accept the Gentileschi picture as a reference, a deeper theme emerges. Art historians Keith Christiansen and Judith W. Mann observe that Gentileschi’s Magdalene evokes the grief-stricken mourners in the Crucifixion and Entombment.⁵ We might add a cross-reference with Anthony van Dyck’s The Lamentation (1618–20) at the Prado—and other similar examples—where Magdalene cradles the dead Christ’s limp hand to kiss its back; it appears as though the head of Magdalene rests on the hand of the dead Christ. In fact, her other arm drops like that of the dead Christ. 

At the same time, religious art historian Diane Apostolos-Cappadona observes that the pose of Gentileschi’s Magdalene may not merely reflect pensiveness or deep sadness, but also a kind of melancholy that is associated with the figure featured in Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514), an iconic print interpreted as a visualization of the Renaissance consideration of artistic genius. According to Apostolos-Cappadona, Gentileschi may thereby depict Magdalene as the painter’s alter-ego, offering a feminine representation of artistic inspiration and creative energy.⁶

We may therefore conclude, based on the old master sources, that Picasso viewed his rendezvous with Marie-Thérèse as both spiritual and sensual, and certainly as a source of creativity. And given the subtext of the Christian iconography, he might have also wanted to express a transformative experience as associated with death and rebirth. Compare the Marie-Thérèse portraits with Peter Paul Rubens’s Saint Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy (1619–20), also known as The Death of St. Mary Magdalene, recognized as a variation after Caravaggio’s Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy. The portrayal of Marie-Thérèse aligns with Rubens’s Magdalene, who falls lifelessly to our left, her head tilted back dramaticly, her brightly-lit body supported by two angels as mourners—akin to the dead Christ in his pupil van Dyck’s Lamentation, painted at or around the same time.

The reappraisal of Gentileschi as a pre-eminent Baroque painter started with an article by the Italian art historian Roberto Longhi in 1916, and the art world was still just beginning to reassess Gentileschi and the Baroque during the 1930s. In fact, Gentileschi remained largely uncelebrated for several more decades, until the rise of feminism and the work of scholars such as Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris in the 1970s and 1980s. Only recently has she truly emerged from the shadows of her well-known father, misattributions, and historical neglect. Yet Picasso seems to situate the female iconoclast alongside her better-known male contemporaries like Carracci, Caravaggio, and Rubens, paying tribute before most of the art world at large caught up.

Meanwhile, Picasso’s portraits of Marie-Thérèse—sometimes criticized as products of a male gaze fixated on a submissive female subject—might acquire new depth when considered through the lens of Gentileschi’s portrayals of Magdalene. While Marie-Thérèse, when considered alongside Matisse’s odalisques, may appear as a one-dimensional subject, Gentileschi’s Magdalene emerges as an independent protagonist fully endowed with agency. Gentileschi’s works center Magdalene as the subject and, by extension, highlight her own artistic vision. Magdalene, after all, is sometimes regarded as a proto-feminist icon: Christ’s disciple, the first witness to his resurrection, and a symbol of spiritual leadership and redemption, challenging the rigid patriarchal norms of her time.

Much has been written on Picasso and Marie-Thérèse, as well as the artist’s other muses and lovers that are featured in his works, but this group of connections invites a different way to examine the subjects, particularly within the rich tradition of old master paintings and religious iconography.