Picasso used common house paint Physicists used an X-ray
nanoprobe to 'see' details of the paint down to the level of
individual pigment particles. Mon, Feb 11 2013 at 10:20 AM The
Red Armchair is the most emblematic of Picasso Ripolin usage and
is the painting that was examined with APS X-rays at Argonne
National Laboratory. (Image: Art Institute of Chicago) 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