E-mail updates
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe to RSS
Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Saidenberg / Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS)
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 with APS X-rays at Argonne National Laboratory.
By Clara Moskowitz
LiveScience
Pablo Picasso, famous for pushing the boundaries of art with cubism, also broke with convention when it came to paint, new research shows. X-ray analysis of some of the painter's masterworks solves a long-standing mystery about the type of paint the artist used on his canvases, revealing it to be basic house paint.
Art scholars had long suspected Picasso was one of the first master artists to employ house paint, rather than traditional artists' paint, to achieve a glossy style that hid brush marks. There was no absolute confirmation of this, however, until now.
Physicists at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Ill., trained their hard X-ray nanoprobe at Picasso's painting "The Red Armchair," completed in 1931, which they borrowed from the Art Institute of Chicago. The nanoprobe instrument can "see" details down to the level of individual pigment particles, revealing the arrangement of particular chemical elements in the paint.
The analysis showed that Picasso used enamel paint that matches the precise chemical composition of the first brand of commercial house paint, called Ripolin. The researchers were able to compare the painting's pigment with those of paints available at the time by analyzing decades-old paint samples bought on eBay. [9 Famous Art Forgers]
What's more, the detailed study, which used X-rays to probe the painting's pigment down to the scale of 30 nanometers (a sheet of copier paper is 100,000 nanometers thick), was able to pinpoint the manufacturing region where the paint was made by studying its particular impurities.
"The nanoprobe at the (Advanced Photon Source X-ray facility and the Center for Nanoscale Materials) allowed unprecedented visualization of information about chemical composition within a singe grain of paint pigment, significantly reducing doubt that Picasso used common house paint in some of his most famous works," one of the research leaders, Argonne's Volker Rose, said in a statement.
Art scholars think Picasso experimented with Ripolin to achieve a different effect than would've been possible with traditional oil paints, which dry slowly and can be heavily blended. In contrast, house paint dries quickly and leaves effects such as marbling, muted edges and even drips of paint. Still, experts couldn't be sure house paint was the key to Picasso's look without proof.
"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. "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."
The scientists detailed their findings in a paper published last month in the journal Applied Physics A: Materials Science & Processing.
Follow Clara Moskowitz on Twitter @ClaraMoskowitz or LiveScience @livescience. We're also on Facebook and Google+.
- Faux Real: A Gallery of Forgeries
- Album: Looking for a Da Vinci
- Research as Art: A Gallery of Scientific Beauty
Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Leave a Comment:
I don't understand the image on the paint can. Why are those three guys standing there like that? It doesn't make sense.
Except for the first one---who's painting on the wall---the one behind him is painting something on the 1st man's back, and the third one is painting something on the 2nd man's back. I don't know what, but it might be some sort of product promotion?
You're right, Annie. I realized that as I looked at it more. So now it makes sense. Still not as good as the Picasso, though.
Here is a larger view of the same Ripolin image. http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://oran2.free.fr/PUB/slides/ripolin.jpg&imgrefurl=http://oran2.free.fr/PUB/slides/ripolin.html&h=536&w=709&sz=54&tbnid=yz14PirUvEgknM:&tbnh=91&tbnw=120&zoom=1&usg=__WVKl7yk1ZCRYori4SHm5LL1Io64=&docid=7x70hPrNNL3U6M&sa=X&ei=PmMVUZjxHrCNigLqsYGIBA&ved=0CEYQ9QEwBQ&dur=494
It's enough he used a FED, but housepaint too? The shame of ebay.
Maybe Picasso had some mild lead poisoning when he was a child.
He figured out how to get rich and famous playing with paint.. couldn't have been too dumb.
This link has more information on the three painters, whose names apparently are Riri, Polo and Lino . . .
http://buttes-chaumont.blogspot.com/2010/07/riri-polo-and-lino.html
If you click on the images, they display at a larger size, and the references to the hygienic properties of the paint makes sense when you consider the context, which was in the early-20th century (circa 1913) and was approximately 15 years before the first "wonder drug" (penicillin) was discovered. It also was a time when there were few vaccines, which basically mapped to the combination of very little prevention for diseases and few remedies, hence the standard practice at the time was to scrub and to disinfect regularly everything in areas where there were infants and children. Also, wallpaper was a common covering for walls, but it had the problem of not being so easy to clean and to disinfect. This being the case, paint that could be cleaned easily and did not fade quickly would be a big deal, since it also made it possible to have more sunlight in rooms, as the advertising explain. The inks used for wallpaper in those days would fade when exposed to direct sunlight, hence part of the logic for having heavy window curtains and dimly lit rooms . . .
And the graphic design element of having three painters painting each other in sequence and the wall in sequence is a bit of a pun on "ripple", as well
Lots of FUN! :-)
Well, it makes more and more sense from an advertising standpoint, and becomes less and less interesting. The subject of the Picasso is more captivating, with her lopsided boobs(?), dual-perspective face, and strange pointed kitty-paw hands. I think I love her!
I don't think I want him painting our house.
He's been dead for kinda like 40 years, so I guess your house is safe
I always say " my house is a picasso",except I painted it.Who knew?
I think he was sniffing that paint too. I don't see much difference in his art and the psychedelic art of the late '60s. What is the attraction? I don't get it.
The problem we have, is his ideas have already been exposed to the world, as have others which came before, and followed. See, when you are the first to do something, it is seen as being a genius.
Like when Henry Ford created the Model T Ford. He didn't create the first car, mind you.But what he did create, what the assembly line to making them. Hence, he was able to make LOTS of the same car. He could guarantee customers a car in any color they wanted, as long as it was black. And, he made the fast AND cheap.
He created a revolutionary idea by demonstrating if you broke something down into stages, and put all those onto an assembly line, and everyone had just one part, whch they were responsible for, but good at, suddenly, an item could be made cheaply and faster. It led to suddenly lots of people making things fast and cheap. He changed the whole way things were manufactured. revolutionizing the whole business manufacturing and industry world forever.Talk about the power of one idea!
So, take that idea to the art world. Whether it was impressionism, cubism, abstract,romanticism,modernism, whatever. Ideas tend to build onto other movements. If you are the first to create a new field and good at it, you become the gold standard. Though someone else may end up even better. That is what Picasso did. He inspired so many others. Leading to cubism, then the modernism movement.Spreading to even how buildings were designed. Because art influences the way we see our whole world, inside and out.
Those of us who have grown up with it already in the world, just take it for granted. You can get the same idea with music in different eras. From the oldies but goodies, to classic rock, hard rock, to new age to punk, rap, etc. Only when YOU see something new, unknown before, do you appreciate someone elses' genius.
i have 3 of his street arts. there not wroth much someone told me , called the'' bull fighter ''
Seems to me that boiling down his genius to using house paint is an over simplification. He was a great artist regardless of the medium he used.
one and only---I agree. No one pissed off Salon de Paris more. I love his art just for that.
I often wondered how he achieved the no-brush stroke effect.
I love his sculpture more than this paintings, pottery, and drawings, but their significance remains impressive.
Picasso was a fraud! Throws a jumble of incoherent lines and colors on a canvas, draws in an eye or something, calls it "Lady On The Porch" or something equally meaningless, and suddenly he's a genius! I haven't seen a single piece of his 'art' that I'd accept even free (except to sell for big money to some fool). But I surely wouldn't hang any of it in my house. I can get abstract sh!t like that from Target for twelve bucks!
Thing is, he was actually fairly decent at drawing and painting, as long as he wasn't doing the mish-mash he's mostly known for. But then, with a name like "Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y" (no really, that's his real name), why would anyone expect his work to be any more coherent? LOL
People who are true to themselves are not frauds. Try it sometime.
Picasso was a major abusive jerk, but he was anything but a fraud.
You must have had a very judgemental and controlling art teacher...or are you one?
Tao---Because he was part of a greater movement during that time at the beginning of the 20th century. A movement from which we all now benefit. Whether it was his Cubism or Monet's Impressionism, Serault's Pointillism--and I could list them all--but not now. It was those artists that created "outside of the box" and tore us away from only 'Realism' as the Paris Salon would accept. Ever hear the quote by Picasso that goes something like this? "Every child is an artist. The problems is how to remain an artist once we grow up."
His point was that we should learn to create from the heart, from the soul, not how someone else tells us how a tree or a face should be painted. How many people watched us draw as children and put us in their box and told us, "that's not what a dog looks like"? It's these remarks that stamp out creativity in a child.
What about the longevity of the canvases? This is the question which was of most interest to me after learning that he used house paints but the article did not say anything about that. Does it mean that the canvases may fade quicker, since the quality of the paints is different, or be adversely affected in some other ways?
Good question.
Also: Does painting on canvas vs wood matter with house paint? And how is the house paint of today different from the house paint of the 20th Century? It is safer thanks to regulations!
This makes me want to buy some house paint and plywood and compare it with canvas!
Just think of the heights he could have achieved if he had been able to use a really good Home Depot latex flat enamel! Or some Krylon "no runs, no drips, no errors" spray paint!!
Well, the one thing that is truly ironic thing about Picasso, is that although he was the most successful artist in history, in terms of financial wealth, he is not however mentioned amongst the most prominent painters. Picasso's work was rather personal. It was not intended to advance humanity, and as result it hasn't. However, on the other hand, the other interesting twist is in the idea that Picasso was perhaps the most philosophic. Picasso once said..."We all know that art is not the truth. It is instead a lie that helps us to realize the truth." Although Picasso was quite physically gifted, however, as with the majority of other artists, he did not however discover the significance of Spiritual Intelligence, the Skyway that connects the conscious with the sub-conscious mind.
I do fantasy artwork using nothing but spray paint and a small pointy stick. No joke.
There are no rules when it comes to art.