Stunned Conservators Just Found a Ghostly Picasso Hidden Beneath One of the Art Institute...

[Nevilledog]

Stunned Conservators Just Found a Ghostly Picasso Hidden Beneath One of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Most Treasured Paintings

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/picasso-still-life-1896526


What’s better than one Picasso? How about a second Picasso lost for decades?

That’s exactly what a team of research scientists at the Art Institute of Chicago discovered and wrote about in a report published this week in Applied Science.

Pablo Picasso’s 1922 canvas, Still Life, has been one of the jewels in the museum’s collection since it was donated in 1953 by Alice Toklas on behalf of her late partner, the writer Gertrude Stein.

The work dates to Picasso’s late Cubist period, when the artist experimented with flat grids underlying color fields and thick lines.

Over the course of two weeks, Picasso painted three very similar works, all depicting a guitar flanked by a bottle and a bowl.

Researchers at the Art Institute chose to study the painting because of the degree of complexity within its painted surface, which appeared to be wrinkled with multiple layers.

*snip*

[Cirque du So-What]

1. Was there a canvas shortage back then?

Painting over earlier work just doesn’t seem right, but I’m not an artist.

[zipplewrath]

3. Expensive

Artists tell me that canvas and paints are not cheap.

[bamagal62]

2. I paint over paintings all the time.

They are usually what I think of as “fails” or just practice pieces.