News

A deep Picasso

The artist’s museum in Barcelona shows off the results of a scientific investigation in collaboration with other institutions that has uncovered ‘picassos’ hidden in four recycled canvases from his blue period

The standout work is the painting La Vie, owned by the Cleveland Museum of Art in the US THE ART MUSEUM WORKED CLOSELY WITH THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART IN WASHINGTON
Picasso is extremely deep, in a radical and disconcerting sense THE RESULTS OF THE RESEARCH ARE AS ASTONISHING AS THOSE OBTAINED BY ANY ARCHAEOLOGIST

There is lit­tle fear that we will never run out of Pi­casso. And it is also bet­ter not to as­sume that we al­ready know every­thing there is to know about the painter’s work from what we see on the sur­face. As an artist, Pi­casso is ex­tremely deep, in a rad­i­cal and at the same time some­what dis­con­cert­ing sense. Ex­perts al­ready knew that, es­pe­cially dur­ing times of fi­nan­cial hard­ship, Pi­casso reused some can­vases that he had al­ready painted on to cre­ate other im­ages over the top of them. How­ever, new tech­nol­ogy has now al­lowed us ac­cess to these Pi­casso works that were com­pletely in­vis­i­ble to the naked eye. Light has been shed on these un­der­ground pi­cas­sos, bring­ing them to life with ex­cit­ing sharp­ness.

The mu­seum ded­i­cated to the artist in Barcelona has led a pi­o­neer­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tion along with a num­ber of other major in­sti­tu­tions into four of the most iconic works in his col­lec­tion. The re­sults are as as­ton­ish­ing as those ob­tained by any ar­chae­ol­o­gist ex­ca­vat­ing the earth for rich rem­nants of the past, and they are now on dis­play until Sep­tem­ber 4 in the ex­hi­bi­tion Pi­casso. Pro­jecte Blau (Pi­casso. Blue Pro­ject).

The set of art­works ex­am­ined with dif­fer­ent com­bined tech­niques (ra­di­og­ra­phy, in­frared, X-ray, high res­o­lu­tion pho­tog­ra­phy, mi­croscopy, and so on) be­longs to the artist’s blue pe­riod, which oc­cu­pied him be­tween Barcelona and Paris from 1901 to 1904. These are the years in which a sad Pi­casso was in mourn­ing over the loss of one of his best friends, Car­les Casage­mas, who shot him­self in the head in a restau­rant in Paris. The dom­i­nance of the colour blue in many of the works from this time re­flect the artist’s melan­cholic mood.

The stand­out work from this pe­riod is the paint­ing La Vie, which today is owned by the Cleve­land Mu­seum of Art in the United States. A few years ago, it was dis­cov­ered that an­other art­work that had been thought lost was hid­ing below the paint­ing: Last Mo­ments. This was a paint­ing that Pi­casso had pre­sented in his first solo ex­hi­bi­tion at the Qua­tre Gats and then at the Uni­ver­sal Ex­hi­bi­tion in Paris.

The Pi­casso Mu­seum’s Blue Pro­ject also in­cludes the artist’s 1903 paint­ing, Roofs of Barcelona. Be­neath this work that the artist com­posed in his work­shop on Riera de Sant Joan in Barcelona just be­fore he set­tled per­ma­nently in Paris there is a layer of paint that he re­jected: a naked cou­ple that show many sim­i­lar­i­ties to La Vie.

There are also two fig­ures buried below his work from 1901, Still Life. Ap­pro­pri­ate to the melan­choly style of Pi­casso at this time, the fig­ures are not look­ing at each other or com­mu­ni­cat­ing in any way. The artist even­tu­ally painted over them, but he kept some of the mo­tifs of his orig­i­nal idea, such as the table at which they sat.

“Pi­casso would not have done the still life we cel­e­brate today if he had started from a blank can­vas,” says Reyes Jiménez, head of the pre­ven­tive con­ser­va­tion and restora­tion de­part­ment at the artist’s mu­seum on Mont­cada. Yet she adds that she does not be­lieve that the only ex­pla­na­tion for the reuse of these can­vases is the fi­nan­cial hard­ships of the young Pi­casso. In her opin­ion, the artist also wanted to chal­lenge the viewer with vi­sual games. “He could have com­pletely painted over the pre-ex­ist­ing im­ages, but in­stead he de­cided to adapt and morph them. He in­ten­tion­ally leaves traces of the early paint­ings,” Jiménez ex­plains.

The Blue Glass from 1903 is an­other lu­mi­nous case of this in­ter­nal mu­ta­tion. This piece holds not one but two un­der­ly­ing paint­ings from pre­vi­ous icono­gra­phies. The fa­mous Por­trait of Jaume Sabartés with ruff and cap (1901) also hid a lot of se­crets that dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy has now re­vealed.

“We’ll have to keep re­search­ing,” says Jimenez, who praises the chance to work along­side other in­sti­tu­tions in find­ing and re­search­ing the hid­den pi­cas­sos. On this pro­ject, the Cata­lan art mu­seum worked closely with the Na­tional Gallery of Art in Wash­ing­ton in the US, the Is­ti­tuto di Fisica Ap­pli­cata Nello Car­rara in Flo­rence, Italy, and the Uni­ver­sity of Barcelona. In fact, one of the high­lights of the Blue Pro­ject ex­hi­bi­tion are the short videos that pro­vide a sum­mary of the com­plex processes that were used to dis­cover the hid­den trea­sures below the sur­faces of the paint­ings.

And there is one more in­cen­tive to visit the ex­hi­bi­tion: it also fea­tures the last pi­casso of this pe­riod to be­come part of one of the coun­try’s pub­lic col­lec­tions, the draw­ing The Blind Man (1903), which Barcelona City Coun­cil bought last au­tumn.

art ex­hi­bi­tion

Sign in. Sign in if you are already a verified reader. I want to become verified reader. To leave comments on the website you must be a verified reader.
Note: To leave comments on the website you must be a verified reader and accept the conditions of use.