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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday February 18 2018, @10:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the layers-upon-layers dept.

Picasso painted over another artist's work—and then over his own, new imaging reveals

Hidden beneath the brush strokes of Pablo Picasso's 1902 oil painting La Miséreuse accroupie (The Crouching Beggar) lies the work of another Barcelona artist. And the underlying work seems to have inspired some of Picasso's artistry. Mountains in the original painting—a landscape scene—became the outline of the back of the subject in Picasso's work, which depicts a crouching, cloaked woman.

Experts have known about the hidden image since 1992, when the underlying layers of the painting were first probed using x-ray radiography. But new work, using modern imaging techniques, is revealing more detail—not only about the original painting, but also about Picasso's. Researchers discovered another hidden layer: Under the woman's cloak, Picasso painted an image of her hand clutching a piece of bread, the team announced here today at the annual meeting AAAS, which publishes Science.

The discovery allows us "to look inside Picasso's head and get a sense of how he was making decisions as he was painting the canvas," says Marc Walton, a cultural heritage scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and a lead researcher on the study. "He reworked, he labored on painting this individual element, but then chose to abandon it at the end."

Related: The Picture Under the "Mona Lisa"
Particle Accelerator Reveals Hidden Degas Painting


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday February 19 2018, @12:03AM (6 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 19 2018, @12:03AM (#639872) Journal

    ... blink... blink... and your point is...?

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Monday February 19 2018, @12:14AM (5 children)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday February 19 2018, @12:14AM (#639879) Journal

    This is yet another story about a superartist, which is sort of like a supermodel. There are thousands of extremely talented artists we never hear about, never notice, and maybe we should.

    It's a more general problem, this tendency to zero in on "the best", with unavoidably subjective aspects to the evaluations, while ignoring the rest.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday February 19 2018, @12:46AM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 19 2018, @12:46AM (#639890) Journal

      This is yet another story about a superartist, which is sort of like a supermodel.

      Another PoV - TFA is not about artists or fame, it's about the (forensic non-destructive) techniques that were developed.

      Look to the Particle Accelerator Reveals Hidden Degas Painting [soylentnews.org] - the technology developed sped-up the imaging time [nature.com] - so either faster or higher resolution than previously is now possible.
      Granted, the technique could have been tested using no matter what other painting. But I don't think someone would have provided the money to solve the general problem if it wasn't about "a painting by a superatist".

      In this case:

      This type of imaging [X-ray reflectometry] isn’t new, but the instrumentation is. In the past, the technique could only be done in a lab outfitted with expensive equipment. Walton and his colleagues designed a “simple, do it yourself type of kit” that’s easy to bring to an art gallery and only costs $1000, assuming a researcher already has a hand-held x-ray reflectance spectrometer (common at many cultural heritage institutions, Walton says). Many institutions don’t “want a work of art to travel, so we can now bring the techniques to the museum,” he says.

      I don't know if this 'reliance on superartist works to get funding' is unfortunate or not, but that's the reality of the world we are living in [youtube.com], it won't change in our life time, so let's get the best-under-circumstance out of it.

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 4, Informative) by realDonaldTrump on Monday February 19 2018, @03:20AM (3 children)

      by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Monday February 19 2018, @03:20AM (#639940) Homepage Journal

      You sound young. I'm not so young anymore. You get a little older, you start to understand, we don't live forever. My buddy Peter Thiel, he wants to live forever. And if anybody can do it he can. The rest of us, we die someday, right? So why spend time on things that aren't the best?

      Why not date a few supermodels and see what happens? Maybe you'll find one you like, I did.

      And superartists, good word. We have a Renoir, you didn't say Renoir but he's one of the greats. The superartists. We have one of his in Melania's office in New York, in her home office. It's called La Loge, very sexy painting. Let me tell you, so many of the art people are very fake. So many are snobs. I know what I like. I have some art to look at. And to show off. But for an investment, I like a better return. Real estate is so much better.

      Let me tell you a story about a New York art snob. After Melania moved into the White House with me, we wanted to spruce the place up. And we had heard that the Guggenheim had a beautiful, beautiful painting by Van Gogh -- one of your superartists -- called Landscape with Snow. Very Christmasy! So we asked the museum to let us borrow it. And got back a very nasty EMAIL from a very nasty woman named Nancy Spector. She told us they don't have that painting, I think that was a lie. But she says, how would I like a sculpture instead? She says it's solid gold, it's only 18 karat but it's solid. And, get this, it's a toilet. That everybody and his dog have been using at the museum, have been doing their business in. Every Tom, Dick & Harry. Gross! Already, you know I'm going to tell her "no," right? But it gets worse. Because the so-called artist, who nobody has heard of, called his gold toilet "America." Very insulting to our Country! Can we call it treason? Why not, huh? And Nancy blogged about it, we checked the cyber and she has a whole blog about the toilet and about me. SO CREEPY!

      • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday February 19 2018, @11:02AM (1 child)

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 19 2018, @11:02AM (#640049) Journal

        To my surprise, it's true [abc.net.au]!

        --
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday February 19 2018, @02:37PM

        by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday February 19 2018, @02:37PM (#640096) Journal

        Yep, I definitely overlooked Renoir. The President could make some poor, unknown artist into a superartist. Reagan liked to read Tom Clancy, and when the public found out, it helped turn him into a superauthor, his stories made into box office winning films. The artist need not be a painter-- painting is so obsolete, was challenged to get more creative over a century ago with the arrival of the camera. Even Van Gogh and Monet had to compete with the camera. Now we have digital cameras and art with pixels, and better, on computers. A vector graphics medium, of which there are several, is a great foundation for artistic expression.

        And now, my own spin on Godwin Law: COPYRIGHT MUST DIE! Whoever thought they were being so clever bringing up the subject of gold toilets, which are not at all artistic, just utterly crass, boring, and impractical (gold is really heavy, probably have to reinforce the floor to hold the weight), not to mention nasty, how'd they feel if the museum's entire collection was scanned, really, thoroughly scanned in many wavelengths at extremely high resolutions like this Picasso was, digitized, and made available for upload from the Library of Congress? They ought to like that, but a lot of museums are still in love with the idea of artificial scarcity, and secretly hate technology, fearing that their reason for existing will be gone. A digital work of art that can be perfectly freely copied, freed from the chains of copyright, is much, much more accessible, and safer. It would be virtually impossible to steal, damage, lose in a fire or otherwise destroy, get trimmed by bureaucrats or slashed by the mentally ill like what happened to Rembrandt's Night Watch, time couldn't gradually darken it and crack the paint, and it's so much more accessible to the public.