Paris through Picasso’s double vision

In 1997 Will Shank, then chief conservator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, got a surprising phone call from his counterpart at Washington’s National Gallery. SFMOMA had shipped the National Gallery a Picasso for an exhibition about the artist’s early years. Now the museum was getting back two Picassos.

In Washington, curator Ann Hoenigswald X-rayed many of the incoming paintings for the show to learn about Picasso’s technique. Years earlier she had discovered versions of familiar scenes under some of the artist’s paintings. But what she found under the San Francisco canvas was something altogether different.

The surface of the “Rue de Montmartre” shows three figures on a somber Paris street. The X-ray revealed a joyous nightclub packed with revelers and dancers. It was, Hoenigswald realized, reminiscent of Picasso’s well-known “Le Moulin de la Galette,” normally in New York’s Guggenheim Museum but then in Washington for the show.

“It was,” Shank says, “a startling discovery.”

Perhaps just as startling is that you can now look at both works side by side. For the first time in more than a century, the early Picasso is visible -- or at least a computer re-created facsimile displayed as a full-sized backlit transparency.

This fall the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, opened a small exhibition, “A Hidden Picasso,” displaying the two paintings and the transparency. The discovery opens a window on Picasso’s crucial formative trip in 1900 from his native Spain to Paris, where he stayed from October to December. Picasso was 19, a prodigy at home but just another aspiring painter in the arts capital of the world. Along with his traveling companion Carles Casagemas, Picasso frequented smoky dives such as the Moulin de la Galette, which had already been the subject of works by Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec.

“The Moulin de la Galette,” Casagemas wrote in a letter during their stay, “has lost all its character.” Still, Picasso found enough inspiration in the locale to paint a crowd of well-dressed revelers pushed up against a row of cancan dancers disappearing in a swirl of skirts.

“It was a very well-known scene,” Shank says. “Picasso had a lot of guts; it was very bold and shows this kid with all this self-confidence.” Then Picasso painted over the work. He didn’t whitewash the canvas but started an entirely different composition atop the older one.

“I think it was 90% completed,” Shank says. “There was a lot happening, too much going on. I think he wanted to make a larger statement. He just got in over his head. My theory is that he liked the idea and kept it in his head.”

The new painting was starkly different from the gay nightlife scene: A man stands on a street corner while a woman and a child pass by, all dark, brooding colors except for a splash of yellow on the distant buildings of Paris.

“The first painting was too Spanish,” Shank says. “That’s why he painted the other scene; it would sell to tourists. It was nonthreatening; the other was very avant-garde.”

Picasso, of course, did do another version of the nightclub scene, “Le Moulin,” which wound up in the Guggenheim and was long thought to have been Picasso’s first Parisian work. This painting is four times as large as the rediscovered prototype but focuses more tightly on the nightclub demimonde. “The earliest and most important of Picasso’s Paris paintings,” John Richardson called it in his 1991 biography.

A circuitous path to completion

Re-CREATING the painting was no easy task -- technically or logistically. Shank proposed that SFMOMA sponsor the project and that the museum put it on its exhibition calendar for 2001. Then the stock market tanked, dragging down the museum’s endowment and forcing it to cut staff and shows.

Shank wound up as a freelance conservation consultant with a great idea but no patron. Then the Guggenheim called, offering to host an exhibition to mark the 20th Congress of the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, which was being held at its branch in Spain.

Repainting the image took Shank much longer than Picasso took to make it in the first place.

“Picasso was in a fury, cranking these out,” he says. “He was full of energy. He was painting like crazy, fast and furious.”

First Shank had to make a high-resolution digital image of the painting. Peering into cracks on the surface at high magnification, Shank could see bits of pigment from the original painting. “There were cracks everywhere,” he notes. “I thought I could read every color on the underpainting.”

Shank then matched up the pigment traces with the X-ray, essentially giving him a paint-by-numbers guide to making a Picasso. Shank’s collaborator, Tim Svenonius, spent three months moonlighting from his day job as production manager for interactive educational technologies at SFMOMA using Photoshop to color the image.

“It was rather intimidating,” Svenonius says. “You don’t want to do anything that would seem too bold or presumptuous. It’s rather sensitive to be handling the work of such a deity in the field.”

The team was lucky that Picasso had used lead-based white paint on the original composition, which gave the X-ray a high degree of clarity.

“It was months and months of intense labor,” Shank says. “Ninety percent is Picasso. There was very little extrapolation. It’s a happy coincidence of the technology meeting the need.”

Svenonius admits that a certain amount of guesswork was involved.

“Ultimately we had to make some guesses based on paintings done around the same time,” Svenonius says. “The richer, brighter colors we could gauge with some accuracy. The flesh tones were hard to get.”

The Bilbao show displays both Picasso paintings, the transparency as well as documents tracing the artistic and technical history of the works.

“The museum public loves this kind of information,” Hoenigswald says. “People are intrigued by how paintings are produced and how artists work. There were lines in Bilbao to get into the exhibit.”

“A Hidden Picasso” is scheduled to remain on view through Jan. 9 (www.guggenheim.org); no other venues have been announced.

Actually, Shank says, the Picasso wasn’t that hidden at all. Sitting in his living room in an 1886 Victorian where he discovered ceiling murals that had been painted over, Shank pulls out a reproduction of “La Rue Montmartre.” He points out some ghost images and odd patches of brushwork.

“Even with a naked eye you can see something weird, hints and clues of what’s underneath,” he says. “Clearly there was something else there.”

Or as Hoenigswald puts it: “The San Francisco picture just screamed out to me that there was something underneath.”

Picasso could easily have reprimed the canvas if he really wanted to start from scratch. “Most artists would have completely obliterated the whole painting,” Shank says.

That the painter didn’t, Shank ventures, suggests that Picasso wasn’t simply trying to save money but that subsuming one work with another was central to his view of artistic creation.

“Picasso was playing a game with the viewer,” Shank says. “It was a game he plays his whole life -- a metamorphosis of one object into another. This painting is one of the first instances of that. What we learn about Picasso from this is that he was never sure when his paintings were finished. He reused canvases his whole life. He did that when he was rich and famous.”

Shank will move to Rome next year to take up a fellowship at the American Academy to study ways to preserve contemporary murals.

“There are bits and pieces of other Picassos hidden behind other Picassos,” he says, “but I don’t think there’s anything like this.”