In Picasso’s ‘Blue Period’, scanners find secrets he painted over

Bits of colour were peeking out through cracks in the dark shades of La Miséreuse accroupie, a 1902 painting by a young Pablo Picasso during his “Blue Period.”

That was not surprising. X-ray images taken a quarter- century ago had shown that Picasso had painted this work, known in English as The Crouching Woman over another artist’s landscape.

Sandra Webster-Cook, a conservator of paintings at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, which owns the painting, also observed textures of the brush strokes that seemed neither to reflect Picasso’s composition nor the underlying landscape. “It was clear there was something else going on underneath,” Webster-Cook said.

The Ontario staff reached out to experts at the National Gallery of Art, Northwestern University and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Using tools originally developed for medicine, manufacturing and geology, the researchers peered through the canvas without damaging it. They saw how Picasso had incorporated the contours of hills from the earlier painter’s landscape into the curves of the woman’s back. “Kind of a jazz riff back and forth,” said Marc Walton, a research professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern.

The analysis also uncovered Picasso’s repeated efforts to paint the woman’s right arm. He ultimately abandoned that part of the composition, covering it with a cloak.

“So this again is getting into the mind of the artist and understanding his creative process,” Walton said.

The findings were presented Saturday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin, Texas. At the meeting, researchers also presented new insights into Picasso’s bronze sculptures based on an analysis of the alloys.

“We’re really opening a new era of inquiry in the way these iconic works of art were made,” said Francesca Casadio, executive director of conservation and science at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Casadio and Walton are directors of the Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts, a collaboration between the university and the art institute to apply technology to art history. Three years ago, WebsterCook and Kenneth Brummel, the Ontario museum’s assistant curator of modern art, attended a conference in Barcelona about the scientific analysis of other Blue Period paintings. One of the scientists Webster-Cook met there was John K Delaney, a senior imaging scientist at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Delaney later went to Ontario to examine La Miséreuse accroupie using a technique that records the brightness of reflected light across a swath of the visible and infrared spectrum of light.

Various molecules absorb certain colours of light. The technique, called reflectance hyperspectral imaging, allows scientists to identify minerals based on patterns of dark lines in the spectrum. It is the same technique that NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter uses to figure out the makeup of Martian rocks from orbit.

Delaney’s images revealed the hidden right arm.

Scientists from the Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts then viewed the painting, using a portable instrument that bathed the canvas with X-rays, some of which were absorbed by elements in the painting’s pigments, then re-emitted. Different elements in the pigments radiate at different wavelengths.

Maps of the iron and chromium in the painting — Prussian blue is an iron-based pigment and chromium is used in yellow pigment — largely matched the structure of the current painting. But the patterns of cadmium, used for an array of yellows, oranges and reds, and lead, for a white pigment, showed a different painting, adding detail about the right arm and hand.

“The arm is a very strange pose,” Brummel said. “The elbow rests on the thigh, and you have this hand that’s awkwardly positioned just below the right shoulder, holding a disk.” (The disk appears to be a loaf of bread.) Brummel said the hidden arm is similar to that of a woman in a Picasso watercolour that was also painted in 1902.

Using tools originally developed for medicine and geology, the researchers peered through the canvas without damaging it