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"  Before we get into the details of this exciting find, what has driven you to pursue art conservation? Well, Ive always been interested and enjoyed making art, but I didnt feel like I had anything to say. I went working for a field where I could use my hands. Back when I was first interested, I had a tour of the conservation labs in The National Gallery and I was just fascinated, especially by the x-ray and infrared work that theyd done and the idea of discovering how artists work.  How deeply do you need to understand the materials youre working with? Paintings are layered structures. Although they seem two-dimensional, they certainly consist of a support canvas or a board and various paint layers. All of those layers interact with one another, but act on their own as well. Then you have to understand environmental factors and how materials react to changes in environment. Of course, understanding the materials is absolutely necessary for a conservator to intervene and react with the materials. Deciding what were going to do when removing dirt from an unvarnished paint surface for instance, we need to have a good understanding of the chemistry were going to be using.  This hidden Picasso painting has been hiding in plain sight for more than a century. But this wasnt an accidental discovery; investigative work on this piece began decades ago. Can you describe the process that finally brought you to this discovery? A trained eye looking at the painting will realize that the texture of the surface doesnt line up with the composition that we see. Thats a clue that the artist made changes or theres something else going on underneath the paint surface. You can see long contour brush strokes, so it indicates that perhaps theres another painting underneath. We have a letter from a conservator from 1954 that mentioned this, the texture. Its something that people have noticed. Before I worked here in the mid-90s, the painting was X-rayed. It was confirmed that there was some completely different composition underneath, but it wasnt a very clear picture. You can start guessing at a lot of things and seeing things that arent there.   When I came to the Phillips, my supervisor said would you like to work on this? I was lucky to have some help from colleagues in the community, imaging scientists, to start to understand how we could get the best image that we could get from the camera we have. There are different kinds of infrared detectors, and I learned to use the filters that we have, the band pass filters. And it just so happened that in our paintingat least for this onePicasso happened to use Prussian Blue. Using a particular filter, we were able to see through a lot of that Prussian Blue.    Infrared of Pablo Picassos The Blue Room (1901). The Phillips Collection, copyright 2008.   What was it like seeing that clear image for the first time? It was pretty fantastic. Having the X-ray and a different infrared image that wasnt as clear, youre sort of craving for more information, and that image really gave us so much information. We couldnt really piece everything together, especially the sitters face. We werent able to see any of that with the other images. So it was very exciting.   You feel like youre the first person to see this even though everyone knows something is there. Then you think, &amp;quot;How is this significant? Who is this? Why is it painted over? Are there any drawings or documentation of who this might be? Any inscriptions? The wheels start turning about who it is. Unfortunately, were continuing to research who it is but we havent had any luck as of yet.  What kind of tech advancements made this kind of art sleuthing possible? Conservation tends to look to other industries for technology that will help us in our work. Infrared imaging, especially the more recent imaging, comes from military technology. Conservators have been using X-rays for a long time and thats parallel with medical and industrial X-rays. Recently, some of the collaboration that we were able to do was using remote sensing technology. I know it can be used for earth sciences and agriculture. Some people in the field recognize this, and they start testing it for use with artwork.  Picasso has repurposed canvases in several of his paintings, especially his early work. How rare of a find is this, and how do these hidden paintings impact the art world? We have one early Picasso in our collection, and theyre scattered about throughout the world. Its not that rare that he painted over pictures, but having the means and opportunity to examine these paintings is more rare. Discoveries like this always give us more information with which to evaluate and understand an artist: their intentions in their work, their thinking process, their development.   For Picasso in particular, the year that The Blue Room was painted in 1901 was a really transitional year for him stylistically. He was doing a lot of experimenting. He was very prolific, and his style changed quite a bit. In our research, were learning that the two pictures were painted in the same year. It gives us a sense of what he was going through. Hes 19 or 20 years old. Hes honing his style.   The other thought, especially since there might be other paintings with whole works underneath, [is that] its this whole other body of work that we can look at to better understand Picasso at this point at his life. When another painting is discovered, the question often asked is why? The more we can find out about these things, maybe we can get closer to answering that question.  Would there ever be a time when some representation of these paintings would be on display in galleries? I think it depends on the technology, but one of our goals is to go from the black-and-white infrared image to a color approximation of what the hidden painting would have looked like. This is based on pigment analysis and very closely looking at the painting itself and trying to understand what the paint distribution is, what the palette is. I say approximation because you never can know for sure.  Will we ever discover the identity of the mystery person in this painting? Since we have this clear picture, we can begin looking at some drawings Picasso did. Picasso had a lot of drawings of his friends. We can go through and try to find a match. A lot of his friends had beards and goatees.   Since weve discovered it everyone has the same reaction: Who is it? Since weve made it public, the interest has been overwhelming, and weve received a lot of theories on who the sitter might be in the last 24 hours from all over the world. Its been amazing to see how into this story people are. As I understand it, the twitter [hashtag] is #blueroom, and its been everything from these weird cats in place of the sitter, a painting within a painting within a painting within a painting. Some of my favorite suggestions have been Doctor Who, [with some people] saying oh, its the eleventh doctor. Then someone says everyone knowns Doctor Who shows up in Van Gogh, not Picasso.   A name that were still investigating, but were not really sure about, is Ambrose Villard, a picture dealer in Paris who gave Picasso a show at his gallery in 1901. But there are a number of factors that rule him out as well. We need more concrete evidence. This was one intent of putting the picture out there so that experts across the world could see it, because you never know what people have seen. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a10820/discovering-a-hidden-picasso-16904979/>