The Courtauld Institute of Art
Who is the woman who lurks behind Fernández de Soto? A lover? A friend? What is certain is that Picasso found a joke to overlap images.
O Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Sotopainting of Pablo Picasso’s famous “blue period”, represents his friend and sculptor with the same name. But have it always been like this?
It seems not – now, 125 years later, a team of investigators from the London Courtauld Institute of Art found that before being painted over it, the picture had actually hidden a woman’s face.
Revealed by infrared and x -ray images, the face “literally came up before our eyes… piece by piece”, tells the Barnaby WrightDeputy Director of the Gallery.
“It can be forever a kind of anonymous model,” said Wright. But they are working on their identification. “It may have been just someone who served as a model to Picasso… it may have been a loverit may have been a amiga.”
At 19, Picasso then decided to abandon the painting that painted, using the same screen to paint over. This “not only changing the theme, but also changing its style as it developed its famous way of painting the blue period,” said Wright.
X -ray images suggest that Picasso reused this screen three or four times, With different unfinished paintings until I reached the final board, in part because I had no money to buy new materials, but also because “it is evident that he liked the process of turning an image in another,” says the gallery player.
“The screen has not fallen among the theme changes to give it a clean picture. He painted the figure of his friend directly on his wife… One figure is emerging from the othertransforming each other, ”he describes.
“When you know what’s under this technical image and transport it to finished painting, you can see some of these brands very clearly – the eye, ear and hair,” says Wright. “This woman’s ghostly presence is not just under the surface, but is in fact the Press the surface itself“.
