A team of scientists used X-rays, AI, and 3D printing to recreate a Pablo Picasso painting hidden for centuries beneath one of the artist’s “Blue Period” pieces.
As its name suggests, “The Lonesome Crouching Nude” portrays a huddled naked woman. The image—thought to have been lost until 2010 when X-rays uncovered it behind “The Blind Man’s Meal“—is also depicted as an unfinished painting in the background of Picasso’s “La Vie.”
This is the third reproduction by University College London (UCL) PhD researchers Anthony Bourached and George Cann, who developed a five-step technology to reproduce painted-over art works. The replicas, called NeoMasters, are forged through their company Oxia Palus. The pair developed an AI trained on dozens of Picasso paintings to learn the Spanish artist’s style. Then, using infrared imaging and 3D printing, they created a full-size, full-color image, complete with textured brush strokes.
“I believe Picasso actively welcomed such forensics, since he himself said, ‘I just painted the images that rose before my eyes. It is for other people to find the hidden meanings,'” according to Bourached, who’s researching machine learning and behavioral neuroscience at UCL. “Like Leonardo imagining the helicopter, was Picasso envisioning technology that could recall his lost or incomplete work? It is certainly a hidden secret that ‘La Vie’ points to.”
This marks the first attempt to accurately recreate “The Lonesome Crouching Nude,” which was unveiled on Wednesday as part of the Deeep AI Art Fair at London’s Morf Gallery.
“It’s very exciting to see a work that’s been locked up,” Cann said. “I hope that Picasso would be happy in knowing the treasure he’s hidden for future generations is finally being revealed, 48 years after his death and 118 years after the painting was concealed,” he continued. “I also hope that the woman within the portrait would be happy in knowing that she hadn’t been erased from history and that her beauty was finally being revealed in the 21st century.”
