HIDDEN PAINTING BENEATH PICASSO PAINTING REVEALED BY USING INFRARED LIGHT
The Temple of the Deep will burn on August 31, 2025, marking the emotional climax of the 2025 edition of Burning Man. Follow Miguel Arraiz on Instagram to be informed about its construction and other projects by the Spanish architect.
On August 31, 2025, the Temple of the Deep will be burned, marking the emotional culmination of the 2025 Burning Man. Follow Miguel Arraiz on Instagram to stay up to date on this project and others by the Spanish architect.
Picasso's Blue Period was heavily influenced by the death of his close friend Carlos Casagemas, who committed suicide in 1901. After his death, Picasso reclaimed his old Paris rooms and converted them into his studio. During the fall, his friend, the young Spanish sculptor Mateu Fernández de Soto, came to stay with him, where he painted this portrait. If you look closely at the background of Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto, you will notice a painting on the wall—one of Picasso's tributes to Casagemas, depicting his burial.
Picasso was struggling financially at the time, so he frequently reused canvases rather than discarding them. Instead of whitewashing previous paintings, he simply added new compositions on top of them. While the X-ray image only shows faint tonal traces of the hidden woman, the infrared image contains surprising details. She has a chignon, a popular hairstyle in Paris at the time, and is posed with her elbows resting on the table, arms crossed in front of her. The Courtauld notes that she resembles several of Picasso's seated women paintings from 1901, including Absinthe Drinker and Woman with Crossed Arms.
The identity of the mysterious woman depicted underneath De Soto's portrait is unknown. The Courtauld speculates, "She could have been a model, a friend, or even a lover posing for one of Picasso's colourful Impressionistic images of Parisian nightlife, or a melancholic woman seated in a bar." Using modern technology to reveal the hidden figure literally sheds light on a watershed moment in Picasso's career. According to Barnaby Wright, Deputy Director of The Courtauld Gallery, "Picasso's way of working to transform one image into another and to be a stylistic shapeshifter would become a defining feature of his art, which helped to make him one of the giant figures of art history." All of that starts with a painting like this.
