Strange drawing discovered under a Picasso painting

A strange drawing has been discovered under Pablo Picasso’s painting "The Crouching Beggar Girl," which is kept at the Ontario Art Gallery. A team of researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois, led by Professor Marc Walton, discovered the work through a non-invasive analysis technique, namely the use of an infrared spectroscope.

A first analysis revealed a version of the beggar girl tilted at a 90-degree angle to the final painting, and a second analysis revealed that this tilted version is actually a landscape with a building that looks like a temple and with hills in the background. In this drawing, the inclined head and the beggar’s right hand are still visible, all colored white, blue, gray and green.

“The hidden arm beneath the visible surface of ’The Crouching Beggar Girl,’” said Kenneth Brummel, deputy director of the Art Gallery of Ontario, "is the same as the right arm of the woman in ’Femme assise.’" This hidden drawing may not have been made by Picasso: an initial, but unconfirmed, hypothesis attributes the hidden work to Catalan artist Joaquin Torres Garcia, or alternatively a Barcelona artist close to Picasso at the beginning of his "Blue Period," such as Santiago Rusinol, leader of the Catalan modernist movement.

The discovery was announced at the annual conference of theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin, Texas.

Strange drawing discovered under a Picasso painting

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