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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."

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  • (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.

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