Something always seemed to vex Sandra Webster-Cook as she surveyed the shimmering surface of La Miséreuse accroupie, the 1902 blue period masterwork made by Pablo Picasso when he was just 20 years old. There were drips and inconsistencies that, over time, she chalked up to wrong-minded restoration work. That was fine, she thought. Resolved. And of course, in 1992, the Art Gallery of Ontario, which owns the piece, had X-rayed it to reveal that the young artist had painted it over top of a landscape painting already on the canvas and had built part of a rolling hillside into the crook of his beggarly subject’s left arm, shrouded in a green shawl. But there was something else, Webster-Cook, the gallery’s senior painting conservator, always believed: an irregular slash of horizontal lines — brushed out, but not quite — resting near her right shoulder. No X-ray could draw it forth, preserving its mystery — something in which the modern master seemed to delight. “In the 1950s, he said, ‘You should be doing X-rays of my work, because you’ll find things underneath,’” said Kenneth Brummel, the AGO’s curator of modern art. “He didn’t get any more specific, but he urged people to do just that.”But he could never have imagined how deep, one day, researchers would go. In recent months, Brummel and Webster-Cook have taken Picasso’s cheeky dare and gone him one better. It’s the culmination of decades of fascination for Webster-Cook, a technological leap forward that’s compelled La Miséreuse accroupie, painted in Barcelona and in the AGO’s collection since 1963, to surrender her mysteries to the prying eyes of technology. More than that, it’s an insight into the artist himself and the place in the world that, even barely past his 20th birthday, he had in mind for himself. By now, the underlying landscape was far from news. Picasso was known to paint over w ...
|
