Museum uncovers ‘adorable dog’ buried in Picasso masterpiece

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A hidden dog has been discovered in an early Pablo Picasso masterpiece more than a century after it was first created.

The animal was concealed beneath a thin layer of dark paint in Le Moulin de la Galette, which was completed in 1900 when the Spanish artist was just 19 years old.

Picasso’s Le Moulin de la Galette at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Curators at the museum discovered a dog had been painted where the dark patch by the table is now (centre left, foreground).Credit: Picasso/Guggenheim Museum

The painting is now on display at the Guggenheim Museum in New York as part of the Young Picasso in Paris exhibition.

It was re-discovered because modern imaging technology allowed experts to see the original outline that lay beneath.

Julie Barten, the museum’s senior paintings conservator, said: “If you look closely [at the painting] you can see there’s this lingering ghost of the dog.

“There’s red paint showing through in areas and if you look really closely you can see the eyes and the ears.

“You can see that, when concealing it, he actually left the contour of the head still visible.”

Barten said she always had a strong feeling there was something hidden beneath the painting.

“What we know was that in many instances Picasso painted aspects of the composition and then subsequently obliterated them and transformed them into other compositional elements.

“This was really part of his practice”, she added.

Curators at the museum discovered a dog, seen here enhanced, under a thin layer of paint.

The Guggenheim exhibition looks at the painter’s formative years in Paris and the impact they had on his work.

Roberta Smith, co-chief art critic at The New York Times, described the exhibition as an insight into “Picasso before he was Picasso”.

She said: “The completeness and complexity – the amazing growth spurt – of Le Moulin de la Galette cannot be underestimated. It is one of the first paintings Picasso completed in Paris – the masterpiece of this initial two-month transformative immersion.”

Megan Fontanella, the Guggenheim’s modern art curator, said: “It completely changes how one would have encountered this picture.

“You would have seen this really quite adorable dog in the foreground, looking almost directly at the visitor, with this wonderful red bow.”

She said it was open to speculation as to why Picasso covered up the dog, but suggested it may have been because it would have drawn the observer’s eye away from the main subject of the painting.

The painting depicts a hall full of elegantly dressed men and women dancing, drinking and gossiping. In the foreground of the picture a woman leans on a table covered with a white cloth.

The Telegraph, London

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