Fifty years after his death, Picasso’s oeuvre still holds delights—like the presumed picture of a dog that a group of conservators simply found underneath the surface area of his Parisian nightlife scene The Moulin de la Galette (1900).
Picasso’s handle the thrumming titular Bohemian hotspot plays focal point to “Young Picasso in Paris,” the Guggenheim’s contribution to worldwide exhibits honoring the artist’s tradition this year. On view through August 7, the program checks out the artist’s love affair with the City of Lights through 10 paintings and illustrations he produced throughout his very first year in Paris.
Installation view of “Young Picasso in Paris” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Photo: Midge Wattles © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.
Prior to putting The Moulin de la Galette on screen for the very first time in 50 years, Guggenheim conservators teamed up with peers from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art to tidy gunks off the painting—and look into its history.
The innovation they utilized isn’t too brand-new. A 2017 X-radiography scan of this work, in reality, revealed Picasso changed the gender discussions of 2 figures, phase right. The latest efforts, however, combined X-ray fluorescence with infrared and visible reflectance to craft a false-color image of the work’s red, white, and yellow pigments. Employing more than one methodology exposed unseen subtleties in the artist’s technical approach—alongside erased components like a King Charles Spaniel, hidden beneath a semi-sheer splotch.
Detail of the lower-left corner of Picasso’s The Moulin de la Galettewith inset optimized, false-color image approximating the appearance of the underlying dog that Picasso eventually concealed. Imaging by Elena Basso, Silvia Centeno, John Delaney © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
“It would not have been unusual for canines, especially small lapdogs, to be present in Montmartre dance halls,” curator Megan Fontanella told Artnet News. Another street scene from the same year titled Leaving the Exposition Universelle, Paris features 2 noticeable dogs in the foreground.
Why Picasso would get rid of such an adorable function from The Moulin de la Galette stays uncertain, particularly when his ardor for his own dog Lump is well-known. Most theories indicate visual appeals: the direct look and debonair red bow on this show-stopping animal would jail attention on sight, sidetracking from the swirl of the partygoers.
“In leaving behind hints or vestiges of his compositional changes, it could simply be a matter of Picasso working in haste and not always bothering to completely obscure his reworkings,” Fontanella mused. Maybe the artist got a casual satisfaction from leaving hints. “The 19-year-old Picasso could hardly have imagined that scientific advances would today afford us the opportunity to visualize, through technical imaging, his underlying compositions,” she said.
Julie Barten, the senior painting conservator from the Guggenheim who led this task, kept in mind that while they’re not preparing deep dives into any extra paintings throughout this program, “conservation scientists continue to discover more and more examples of Picasso reworking compositions, so further discoveries are indeed likely.”
“Young Picasso in Paris” is on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, through August 7.
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