Solving mystery of Ghost Subject by Picasso

A Picasso work dated 1904 hanging in New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum depicts a skeletal female figure, her cheeks sunken, her eyes hollow, as she is pressing down with all her possible might on an iron. The work, titled ‘Woman Ironing’, from his ‘Blue Period’, has been considered the institution’s most important work.

It has been one of the artist’s greatest mysteries that conservators for years have known the fact that the ghost of a figure lies beneath the surface - a three-quarter-length view of a ubiquitous man with a mysterious mustache that Pablo Picasso had painted over. Picasso was known to reuse some of his canvases because he didn’t have enough money at that point in his life to buy supplies. According to his biographer John Richardson, it well could be a piece from a previous period.

The Guggenheim’s chief conservator, Carol Stringari, added that though the work has been X-rayed, they haven’t had the resources for analyzing it fully. Still, curators, scholars and historians have speculated over the years about whom that figure might be. Some feel it could be that of the artist himself. Others guess it’s friend and tailor Benet Soler who supported him and whom he had depicted around that time period.

Now a substantial grant from Art Conservation Project of the Bank of America will give the museum enough money and scope to try to find out. It can do scientific research and also some treatment. The mysterious painting will be featured in its ‘Picasso Black & White’ exhibit that opens later this year.

The Bank of America’s global arts & culture executive Rena M. DeSisto, stated that the conservation project started in Europe, Africa and the Middle East in 2010, to restore in 10 countries. Since then it has grown fast, including the curious case of ‘Ghost Subject’ by Picasso.