News from diagnostic world: What's behind the Picasso Blue Room?

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On the occasion of the Picasso exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome (22 September-21 January 2018), today we will talk about one of his first masterpieces, "The Blue Room", which is considered to be a prelude to the artist's "Blue Period". “The Blue Room” was painted in 1901 during his second stay in Paris. In particular, we will show you how scientific analyses are useful for revealing what the human eye, even the most expert, is not able to see by its own. 

Traces of craquelures, thickening of the surface and paint losses, which allowed to see unexpected underlying colours, have suspected and encouraged a group of the Phillips Collection’s scientists to investigate further. 

Therefore, the synergistic union of several analytical techniques has allowed the group to obtain important information about the work. Infrared Reflectography (IRR) in the 1500-1650 nanometers spectral range clearly revealed that under "The Blue Room" there was a portrait of a man in turn-of-the-century Parisian dinner, having his head resting on his right hand and rings adorning his fingers. Further, to determine the chemical composition of the pigments, their distribution and the stratigraphy of both the oil paintings, Scanning Electron Microscopy-Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (SEM-EDX), Micro-Fourier Transform-Infrared (μFT-IR), Micro-Raman Spectroscopy (μRaman) and Micro X-ray Powder Diffraction (μXRPD) had been applied. The presence of the same pigments in both the paintings confirms the hypothesis that Picasso painted both the works after a few months from one to the other, as also evidenced by the absence of a varnish and dirt layer between the two compositions. 

On the other hand, Picasso’s practice of reusing canvases, probably for economic reasons, is not surprising and has already been found in other works such as, for example, " Scène de la Rue" (1900), that is painted over a version of "Le Moulin de la Galette ". 

Microanalysis of paint samples also provided a clue on Picasso’s different approaches in painting. In fact, while for the portrait the artist applies pure colours and a mix of paint wet-into-wet on the canvas (technique known as "painting on the first"), in "the Blue Room" Picasso uses mixed colours on the palette. In particular, the use of white zinc throughout the painting, whether on its own or mixed with other colours, suggests that Picasso mixed the various shades of blue, green, pink, and white by hisown. 

Finally, important information were obtained from Reflectance Imaging Spectroscopy (RIS), Luminescence Imaging Spectroscopy and Synchrotron Radiation X-ray Fluorescence (SR-XRF), which are all non-invasive techniques. These allowed to capture data from both paintings simultaneously, detecting different signals for every pigment and every technique, thus providing complementary information to each other. Thanks to RIS it was possible to identify pigments composed by elements with low atomic numbers (for instance, ultramarine blue, which is a sodium and aluminium silicate containing sulphides) while the same pigments show weak signals when detected by XRF; conversely, the SR-XRF mapping is able to identify compounds, while RIS lacks in doing the same. This proves, again, that a single technique would have not be able to characterize the whole palette of Picasso or to completely reconstruct the portrait below. 

If you are interested to discover which kind of pigments were used by the artist in the two works and which is the useful detail for future recognitions of subjects painted by Picasso in the first composition, read the original work (read here , it can be downloaded for free)!

Martina