Secret of Picasso's paint revealed

LEMONT, Ill., Feb. 7 (UPI) -- U.S. researchers say new evidence in the debate among scholars about the kind of paint Picasso used to create his masterpieces points to ordinary house paint.
The Art Institute of Chicago, working with the Argonne National Laboratory, says the findings add significant weight to the widely held theory Picasso was one of the first master painters to use common house paint rather than traditional artists' paint.

Among the Picasso paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago collection, The Red Armchair is the most emblematic of his Ripolin usage and is the painting that was examined at Argonne National Laboratory. Credit: Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Saidenberg (AIC 1957.72) © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The researchers, using a unique high-energy X-ray instrument, called the hard X-ray nanoprobe, to examine samples from Picasso paintings, determined the chemical makeup of paint he used matched the chemical makeup of the first commercial house paint, Ripolin.

That switch in paint gave birth to a new style of art marked by canvasses covered in glossy images with marbling, muted edges, and occasional errant paint drips but devoid of brush marks, the art experts said.
Fast-drying enamel house paint enabled this dramatic departure from the slow-drying, heavily blended oil paintings that dominated the art world until Picasso's time.

Earlier attempts to examine Picasso's paint choice failed because traditional tools wouldn't let investigators see deeply enough into the layers of paint or with enough resolution, the researchers said.

"Appearances can deceive, so this is where art can benefit from scientific research," study co-author Francesca Casadio of the Art Institute of Chicago said in a release from the Argonne lab Thursday. "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."

“Femme Assise Près d’une Fenêtre’’ Fetches $44.8 Million at Auction

A canvas Picasso painted of his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter seated by a window that had sold for $7.5 million at a Christie’s auction in 1997 brought $44.8 million, including fees, at Sotheby’s in London on Tuesday evening.

“Femme Assise Près d’une Fenêtre’’ (Woman Sitting Near a Window),  a colorful canvas from 1932, was guaranteed to sell courtesy of a third party, or what the auction house calls an “irrevocable bid’’(meaning that before the sale, a buyer had already agreed to purchase the work for an undisclosed sum). It was in fact bought by the anonymous guarantor, who was on the telephone with Patti Wong, chairman of Sotheby’s Asia. The guarantor was the only party who could be seen bidding for the painting, which was estimated to bring $40 million to $56 million.

The Picasso was the most expensive work in an evening that also saw strong prices for artists including Monet and Schiele. The sales continue at Christie’s in London on Wednesday evening.