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New Scanning Technique Reveals Secrets Behind Great Paintings (bbc.com)
Researchers in the US have used a new scanning technique to discover a painting underneath one of Pablo Picasso's great works of art, the Crouching Woman (La Misereuse Accroupie). From a report: Underneath the oil painting is a landscape of Barcelona which, it turns out, Picasso used as the basis of his masterpiece. The new x-ray fluorescence system is cheaper than alternative art scanning systems -- and it is portable, making it available to any gallery that wants it. Details were revealed at the American Association for the Advancement for Science in Austin, Texas. The Crouching Woman is a painting from Picasso's blue period.
What is remarkable is that the landscape painting beneath -- probably by a student artist -- is turned 90 degrees. The contour of the hills in the background becomes the crouching woman's back. She takes on the shape and form of the Catalan countryside. Kenneth Brummel, a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, said that he was "excited" when he first learned what lay underneath the Crouching Woman. "It helps to date the painting and it also helps to determine where the painting was made," he told BBC News. "But it also gives a sense of the artists with whom the painter was engaging. And these insights help us ask new, more interesting and scientifically more accurate questions regarding an artist, their process and how they arrived at the forms that we see on the surface of a painting."
What is remarkable is that the landscape painting beneath -- probably by a student artist -- is turned 90 degrees. The contour of the hills in the background becomes the crouching woman's back. She takes on the shape and form of the Catalan countryside. Kenneth Brummel, a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, said that he was "excited" when he first learned what lay underneath the Crouching Woman. "It helps to date the painting and it also helps to determine where the painting was made," he told BBC News. "But it also gives a sense of the artists with whom the painter was engaging. And these insights help us ask new, more interesting and scientifically more accurate questions regarding an artist, their process and how they arrived at the forms that we see on the surface of a painting."
Painting over a crappy painting doesn't mean it was a foundation for the final painting. Paint-overs were common as canvas wasn't exactly cheap and easy to get.
As I suspected, Picasso was a paint-by-numbers fraud.
Great pretentiousness of snobists, you mean.
With everyone acting like it's the greatest, and scolding others for disagreeing, to not be left out and uncool and scolded. Very often without even being aware of what they talked themselves into anymore. Unaware of the fact, that everyone else is playing the same act, except for a small subset who came to that conclusion via independent thinking.
And I don't even dislike Picasso's work. It's just not particularly notable either. ... meh).
I also don't look down upon anyone who does this. It's just a property of the dynamic of the system of the average human social group, that I neutrally observed, and that I found to be harmful sometimes (but mostly
[INB4 being scolded for presumably not being part of the "expert" elite.]
With the the mentioned x-ray images.
Warning! Keep Out of Eyes! Wash Out with Water! Don't Drink Soap! Dilute! Dilute!
There is a wonderful exhibit currently at the Albuquerque Museum of Natural History showing how multi-spectral analysis was used on the Mona Lisa. There are at least three different layers and the technique allows analysis of pigment/varnish types and their ageing.
The big news here seems to be not so much the particular Picasso painting analyzed, but that there is a newer technology that is more portable and so will allow more analysis of old paintings.
I highly recommend the Di Vinci Mona Lisa exhibit to everyone interested in this technology either in Albuquerque or as it moves around the country. I saw it last week as it opened in Albuquerque and was fascinated.
I was stuck with the inability to do good art for half my life, until I finally found out, that good artists tend to incrementally add more details and improvements, to approach the perfect goal, and stopped when it was "good enough".
I always had assumed that you do every detail in one go. Maybe taking longer. But in one go. ... But the most striking thing was, how they always started out with very broad coloration of the available canvas, then adding details one step less broad, and another coat of even finer details, and so on, until the strokes became so tiny that they had to focus on one area at a time, and finally adding the final touch with a little stroke here and there over the entire canvas.
When I watched videos of painters, I was a bit shocked by how much they completely altered in a very late stage of the process. Especially digital artists. Shoving an entire bridge over and changing the perspective a bit, altering the entire painting’s color grading or lighting with small strokes here and there
I know this might be very obvious to many, even from early school experiences. But it wasn't for me, for some reason.
(Maybe because we moved so often, that I had gone to seven different schools by the time I entered higher education, missing parts each time due to the difference of how each school worked.)
Don't be silly: Paul Ryan has no balls.
You're probably right but I still say we should scan for them. If they exist they NEED to be kicked repeatedly by every single American patriot.
i dont feel so bad about photoshopping other peoples work now and saying i made it!
Well, duh!
It's a landscape painting turned into a portrait, what did you expect?
... things like the Gnomon video tutorials on matte painting or character design.
They are great btw.