Picasso’s recycling ways revealed as study uncovers the early life of "Blue Period" painting

Non-invasive imaging techniques developed at Northwestern University near Chicago has revealed that Pablo Picasso probably used another artist’s work as the basis for a piece painted in 1902 during the Spanish artist’s so-called Blue Period, before his art took a radical turn away from realism.

As part of a partnership with the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto, which owns the painting, Mark Walton, research professor of materials science and engineering, studied "La Miséreuse accroupie" (The Crouching Woman) after one of the gallery’s conservation staff noticed colour peeking through cracks in the painting surface.

After this initial observation, the gallery first used x-rays to study the picture. This revealed that if the painting was turned through 90°, a landscape would become visible. John Delaney, senior imaging scientist at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC then studied the painting with infrared reflectance hyperspectral imaging.

This revealed that Picasso had changed the composition of the painting after his initial repositioning and repainting of the original landscape. After this, the Northwestern University/Art Institute of Chicago Centre for Scientific Studies in the Arts (NU-ACCESS) travelled to the AGO with a portable x-ray fluorescence scanner, a device which shows the distribution of elements associated with pigments in the painting. Mark Walton presented the results of these studies at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Austin, Texas.