A new examination of one of master artist Pablo Picasso’s famous works revealed that he painted over a landscape created by another artist.
Picasso’s “La Miséreuse accroupie,” or “The crouching beggar,” was one of his masterpieces from his “Blue Period.” Researchers from Northwestern University and the Art Institute of Chicago’s Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Art used non-invasive techniques such as x-ray fluorescence and infrared reflectance hyperspectral imaging to make a closer examination of the painting.
The discovery showed that Picasso flipped the landscape 90 degrees and used what seems to be a cliff as the line of the cloaked woman’s back in the painting, Live Science reports. This was part of a larger project revisiting Picasso’s work, specifically the materials he used in his paintings and sculptures.
Picasso, born in 1881, was one of the founders of Cubism, an art movement depicting objects in an abstract, multiple-view manner. “La Miséreuse accroupie” is one of his more realistic works, depicting a woman wearing a blue dress and green cloak, crouched against a blue-gray background. During Picasso’s “Blue Period,” he rarely used other colors other than blue, blue-green and blue-gray shades.
The analysis also revealed that not only did Picasso recycle his canvas, he started painting the woman with her right arm and hand holding a disk, and changed his mind to paint over the limb with the cloak. The elements in the yellow paint exposed their presence when compared to the elements in the blue and green paints.
Sandra Webster-Cook, the senior conservator of paintings at the Art Gallery of Ontario, said, “We now are able to develop a chronology within the painting structure to tell a story about the artist’s developing style and possible influences.”
The findings will be presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin, Texas.
