Abandoned Picasso…

Pablo Picasso was known for reusing canvases,  and would layer on more than  13 coats of paint to add texture and revise the original work.  There is a hidden portrait of a man behind The Blue Room  (1901) , and he transformed a painted-over landscape into The Crouching Woman  (1902).

New X-ray and infrared imaging technologies have allowed art historians and conservators to better reconstruct an artist’s work.   Still Life,  a Cubist rendering of a guitar, wine bottle and compote,  masks an  entirely separate  still life  painted in a neoclassical style,  not the blocky,  grid-like design of the 1922 over-painting.