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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."
The article claims different for this particular painting, however they only show a picture of the final painting and of the x-ray machine in front of the painting. They don't show the x-ray scan of what is underneath, so it is hard to actually prove it by using this article. Unless my ad blocker is somehow hiding it, you would think the article would actually show the x-ray to prove the point.
Of course we can never really know the thought process of the artist. But there inevitably are going to be some coincidental shape matches with paint-over. There seems to be a underlying human need to assign deeper meaning or make associations of intent, etc. Often an artist did something because , well, he just felt like it at the time.
With the the mentioned x-ray images.
Warning! Keep Out of Eyes! Wash Out with Water! Don't Drink Soap! Dilute! Dilute!
It's still hard to say if that's the case though. Conceivably Picasso could have chosen from several painted canvases to paint over instead of this particular one. Did he already have his idea in mind when selecting a canvas to paint over such that he chose one that would lend itself most naturally to that endeavor? Or did he choose this canvas at random, allowing what was already there to shape his own creation through some happenstance connection between rolling hills and a woman's hunched back? Perhaps it was some experiment where he selected a random canvas and rotated it to purposefully induce some creative thought, much like one might stare at clouds to imagine what else they might be.
I think there are too many possibilities to definitely try and treat any as definitive truth or even more than possibility.
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.
Other sources, like this article
https://news.nationalgeographi...
have more images.
Well, duh!
It's a landscape painting turned into a portrait, what did you expect?