Popular painting and their hidden secret #5 : The painting under the painting.

Today's painting is gonna be very interesting , because it has many phases or faces :-) .
lets start ,

If you look closely at The Old Guitarist by Pablo Picasso , You can see a dim female silhouette behind the man's head. After taking infrared and X-ray images of the painting, researchers from the Art Institute pf Chicago discovered a few other shapes hidden underneath. Most likely, the artist didn't have enough money to buy a new canvas and had to paint over ones.

Lets discuss it in more detail :

It is not uncommon for artists to rework or even reuse canvases. Careful examination with scientific techniques can offer glimpse of pasts images buried beneath the surface. But sometimes you don't need sophisticated instruments; sometimes the underlying image is very obvious looking at the final piece . This was my experience with Pablo Picasso's "The Old Guitarist" and the ghostly woman"s face in the top center of the painting. Looking at it from the side and letting the light graze the image, you can see the depth of her face very clearly.

Pablo Picasso -"the Old Guitarist " , 1903, Art Institute pf Chicago

"The Old Guitarist" is probably the most iconic painting of Picasso's " Blue Period" (approximately 1901-1904) when he was living in poverty and emotional turmoil. In addition to their obvious monochromatic blue palette, these works have an overall atmosphere of melancholy and seen to focus on poverty, desolation and isolation. The composition of "The Old Guitarist " is a significant shift from the contemporary Impressionism toward emotional Expressionism. I am struck by the unnaturalness of the old blind beggar. His legs are not correctly folded under him , his neck hang as if close to snapping off and his emaciated hands barely seen capable of holding the instrument. It's a stark and powerful image but was only the final image finally painted on this particular canvas in 1903.

Looking closely at the image above you can see the curve of a woman's neck and jaw embedded in the old man's neck and then also two legs extending vertically through his shin. In 1998 conservators recollected higher resolution infrared and x-ray images to decipher what lay beneath.

Research from the Art Institute of Chicago and a 2001 exhibit at the Cleveland Art Museum sought to decipher the under painted images. The most obvious features include a woman's head looking left , an outstretched arm with an open hand to the right and shins which (especially in the x-ray image) appear to be in a seated position. This is the well defined figure of a young woman. In the x-ray image there is another face at the young woman's neck which looks at the right. Mary mathews Gedo at the AIC connects this to a Picasso sketch dated 1902/03 now in Barcelona depicting, a seated penitent old woman with arms outstretched. After even closer examination of the x-ray image , there appears to be the torso, feet and profile of a child nursing at the young woman's left. William Robinson, Associate Curator of Paintings at the CMA, located a letter from March 1903 in which Picasso describes to a friend the same scene apparently here of mother and child with a bull and calf which can just barely be observed on the right of the painting.

We can still see the remnants of the woman today because the blue period paints have faded. Picasso did not white-wash his canvas before starting a new composition while makes the effect more intense now. While "The Old Guitarist" is a masterpiece, I find it even more interesting to follow how young Pablo Picasso composed and reworked his canvases . It is sometime the process that is just as interesting as the finished artwork.

Have a smile on your face after reading this :-) , cause that's my only aim :-) .