X-rays shine light on Picasso’s paint choice
14 Feb 2013 by Evoluted New Media
High-energy X-rays have helped to resolve a decades-long debate among art historians about the kind of paint Picasso used to create his masterpieces.
Published in Applied Physics A: Materials Science & Processing, the findings support a widely held theory that Pablo Picasso was one of the first master painters to use common house paint rather than oils, giving rise to a new style of art that featured glossy images with marbling, muted edges that were devoid of brush marks.
Using the hard X-ray nanoprobe at the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) allowed scientists a close-up view of the type and arrangement of chemical elements in Picasso’s paintings.
“Appearances can deceive, so this is where art can benefit from scientific research,” said Francesca Casadio, senior conservator scientist at the Art Institute of Chicago who co-led the study. “We needed to reverse engineer the paint so that we could figure out if there was a fingerprint that we could then go look for in the pictures around the world that are suspected to be painted with Ripolin, the first commercial brand of house paint.”
Each batch of paint has a chemical signature determined by its ingredients and impurities from the area and time period it was made. These signatures can’t be imitated and lie in the nanoscale range.
The nanoprobe with its high spatial resolution and micro-focusing abilities allowed the scientists to identify the individual chemical elements and distinguish between the size of paint particles crushed by hand in artists’ studios and those crushed even smaller by manufacturing equipment.
The team were able to determine that Picasso used enamel paint to create The Red Armchair in 1931, which is on display at the Art Institute of Chicago. The nanoprobe also enabled the researchers to find out the paint brand and what manufacturing region the paint was originally from.
The researchers say that by studying the chemical composition of art materials, historians will be able to learn about trade movements in ancient times, better determine the era a piece was created in, and learn more about the artist themselves through their choice of materials.
