A Cute Dog Is Found Concealed In Picasso Painting By X-Ray Imaging
Man’s best friend has always been an unsung hero, and now, a discovery that comes 123 years late validates this further.
X-ray scans have identified a sweet little dog that was eventually erased from the narrative of Pablo Picasso’s Le Moulin de la Galette (1900), painted when he was just 19. The young Spanish artist had masked the four-legged figure underneath a thin layer of dark paint, keeping it forgotten with the rest of history.
Visitors at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where the artwork is on show as part of a Young Picasso in Paris exhibition, may now view it with a fresh new perspective.
"Le Moulin de la Galette" is Pablo Picasso's first Parisian painting. It reflects his fascination with the decadence and gaudy glamour of the famous dance hall in Montmartre, where bourgeois patrons and sex workers rubbed shoulders.
— Guggenheim Museum (@Guggenheim) November 7, 2022
Learn more: https://t.co/WEDYYFLQjf pic.twitter.com/xqv3CBrSji
The work, which was created years before Picasso dabbled in what became Cubism, centers around a Bohemian party in the candlelit dance hall of Montmartre’s windmill-turned-cabaret Moulin de la Galette. Men and women are seen dressed to the nines, drinking, dancing, and gossiping in the exciting venue.
At the front, a dark coat appears to be draped over a chair. As it turns out, this “coat” was once a light brown dog, also dressed for the happy occasion with a fancy red bow around its neck.
"How are you doing?"
— tired comrade ðŸ³ï¸ðŸŒˆ (@fiioriera) May 15, 2023
"Mentally? Picasso dog" https://t.co/FbiV1uFWCc
An X-ray examination in 2017 confirmed that there were various pigments tucked underneath the brown mass, and research for the 2023 retrospective blew them out in the open. Julie Barten, the museum’s senior paintings conservator, tells Hyperallergic that X-ray fluorescence revealed that inorganic pigments were scattered in the work.
A hidden dog has been discovered in Pablo Picasso’s early artwork, concealed under a thin layer of paint pic.twitter.com/Io7euP9Urv
— Reuters (@Reuters) May 13, 2023
“If you look closely [at the painting], you can see there’s this lingering ghost of the dog,” Barten tells Reuters.
Before it was obscured, the pooch gazed back directly at the observer with its two adorable eyes. In the finalized version, the pup’s silhouette is still visible in the contours it was replaced by.
It’s unclear why the dog was eventually buried in the painting, but researchers suspect Picasso feared it would steal the attention from the true subjects of the masterpiece, the merrymakers.
At the Young Picasso in Paris exhibition, which opened a month after the artist’s 50th death anniversary, that concern might be warranted.
[via Hyperallergic and The Telegraph, images via various sources]
