By akademiotoelektronik, 12/04/2022

Hidden under a 1903 canvas, a 'restored' Picasso nude using artificial intelligence

The blue Picasso hid another. Preserved at the Metropolitan Museum in New York since 1950, The Blind Man's Meal hides its game well. Bent over her pittance, a chunk of bread in her palm, a small jug touched by her fingertips, a male figure at the periwinkle scarf appears elsewhere. Perhaps he is thinking of the woman, squatting and naked, who inhabits him? This has nothing to do with a chimera; Out of sight, under the surface of the pigments of this canvas painted in 1903 by Pablo Picasso, a female silhouette unfolds. Identified in 2010, thanks to an X-ray analysis of the painting, it now comes back to life with a life-size reproduction produced by two researchers from University College London.

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Anthony Bourached and George Cann are not, however, late painters of the Picasso school, nor virtuoso imitators of the Spanish artist. They are, however, specialists in neurology and physics. As part of their artistic project Oxia Palus, the two researchers are working to revive a selection of lost paintings, using artificial intelligence and 3D printing; a system already employed on a canvas by Amedeo Modigliani and on a landscape by Picasso discovered in the pigmented cuts of the Miséreuse accroupie.

For The Meal of the Blind Man, the scientists thus worked from a refined survey of the painting obtained by X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy. The process allows them to find the outline of the first drawing entered by Picasso on the canvas, which they submitted to an artificial neural network. Sharpened to the different paintings and the style of the artist, the artificial intelligence has embroidered to reconstruct with plausibility the entirety of the original work, unfinished and covered by the scene of the man seated.

The reconstruction of the crouching woman proposed by the artificial intelligence was then printed in 3D, with a relief reproduction of the texture of the canvas and the Spaniard's brushstrokes. Completed by machine, more than a century after being repainted by Picasso, this hybrid work was presented from October 13 to 17 at the Morf Gallery, in London, on the occasion of the AI ​​Art fair dedicated to the works of art made using artificial intelligence.

The Woman of Life

"I hope Picasso would be happy to know that the treasure he had hidden for future generations is finally unveiled," George Cann said in a statement from University College London. "We suspect that Picasso probably painted over this work reluctantly," commented Anthony Bourached. His works from the blue period often ended like this, because he was then still at the beginning of his career and the materials were expensive.

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The crouching nude hidden behind The Meal of the Blind Man is not entirely foreign to the corpus of Picasso's works. As the two researchers indicate, the general silhouette of the anonymous woman is found in a few other productions by the artist, such as in Life, kept at the Cleveland Museum of Art, as well as in various sketches. A possible clue to the "affinities" that the painter may have had for the model, suggest Anthony Bourached and George Cann. Unless it is, in a more prosaic way, one of the many reuses of the painter then in financial difficulties.

Despite the technical feat, the crouching woman reconstituted from the original drawing of the Meal of the blind man did not thrill the American curator Gary Tinterow, who had supervised the discovery in 2010 of the pictorial vestige hidden in Picasso's painting. . "I prefer to look at the spectroscopy, because at least I know every line there is by Picasso," he said according to the Sunday Telegraph. Much of the information provided by the visual reconstruction produced by artificial intelligence, on the other hand, does not seem to correspond to Picasso's touch. Whether Picasso's or an artificial intelligence, the blind man's naked chimera won't brighten his days anytime soon.