The Paper's reporter Huang Song compiled
Recently, a museum in Israel found three unknown drawings under the oil painting "Nude in Hats" by the famous 20th-century artist Amedeo Modigliani.
Coincidentally, researchers at the National Gallery of Scotland found a self-portrait of Van Gogh behind its canvas while X-raying Van Gogh's work "The Head of a Peasant Woman" and found a self-portrait of Van Gogh.
The discovery of the works of Modigliani and Van Gogh is not the concept of "lost masterpieces", and their incomplete and untouchable state will be a tantalizing mystery. This not only excites the researchers and restorers, but also brings more value to the artist's "brand".
Researcher at the National Gallery of Scotland, presenting the Head of a Peasant Woman and the newly discovered X-ray self-portrait of Van Gogh.
Van Gogh's self-portrait was found in Scotland and is not a phantom of Loch Ness. Rather, it was discovered in the course of routine conservation and cataloguing of the work, an invisible work that was expected to have been composed by Van Gogh after he moved to Paris in 1886.
Modigliani's Naked in a Hat is in the collection of the Hecht Museum at the University of Haifa in Israel, where hidden works were discovered by X-ray scanning of the Modigliani exhibition at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia in October.
Although Van Gogh and Modigliani have no real intersection, their situations are similar. After they were born, they were recognized, and their works were always a hot spot for pursuit.
In the hall of the Hector Museum at the University of Haifa, Modigliani's 1908 work Nude in a Hat was hung upside down because there was another work on the back of the same canvas, Portrait of Maud Abrantès.
"Sketchbook on Canvas", Modigliani's canvas contains five paintings
Born in Italy, Modigliani is considered one of the greatest modernist artists of the 20th century. In 1906, he went to Paris and lived under the Montmartre with Picasso and others, and studied sculpture from Brancusi. But he had an eccentric personality, was taciturn, and was the most restless youth in Montmartre's painter circle. Influenced by African and Greek art that began to spread to France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, his work has an elongated neck and face.
He squanders money and talents, and there is a satisfaction of desire hidden in the paintings. But due to poverty and lung disease, Modigliani lived only 36 years and died in Paris on January 24, 1920.
Ninety-five years after his death (2015), Modigliani's Reclining Nude sold for more than $170 million, making it one of the most expensive paintings ever made. Another of his works, Lying to the Left, sold at a New York auction in 2018 for $157 million. The staggering price has once again raised public awareness and attention to his work.
Modigliani, The Lying to the Left, 1917, sold for $157,159,000
In 2017, the Modigliani exhibition at the Palace of the Dukes of Genoa, Italy, where several works were accused of being fake, had to close the exhibition early. In 2018, X-ray technology uncovered past-unknown portraits under Modigliani's collection at london's Tate Gallery.
X-ray images of Modigliani's Portrait of a Girl in the Tate Gallery, UK
Modigliani's 1908 Nude in a Hat is already an unusual work in itself. There are paintings on both sides of its canvas. Visitors to the Hecht Museum's exhibition halls will see a set of upside-down portraits – "Nude in a Hat" hanging upside down and a portrait of the artist's female friend Maud Abrantès (face up) on the back.
Modigliani, Portrait of Mude Jabandes, 1907
In fact, as early as 2010, researchers at the Hecht Museum noticed that there was a third person's eyes under the collar of Jabande, and it was not until this year that the hidden image gradually became clear and became the focus.
Inna Berkowits, a researcher on art history at the Hector Museum at the University of Haifa, points out that modigliani's Portrait of Mudé Jabandes is vaguely visible with the eyes of a third person.
"When we decided to have an X-ray, we just wanted to learn more about the hidden figures beneath Mude Yabandes." Inna Berkowits, an art historian at the Hecht Museum, said. In addition to a hidden woman wearing a hat, two other portraits were found that were completely invisible to the naked eye: one was a man, and the other was a woman with a bun in her hair.
The phone photo shows an X-ray photo of Modigliani's Naked In a Hat
The Nude in a Hat dates back to the early days of Modigliani's artistic career, shortly after he moved from Italy to Paris, when he was looking for a buyer for his work. In 1983, the founder of the Hecht Museum bought the painting.
Today, the work has been found to contain five paintings by Modigliani, probably stacked so by the painter for conservation. Called the work a "sketch on canvas," Berkowits showcases Modigliani's repeated attempts and "never-ending exploration of artistic expression."
Learn how "artistic geniuses" work by hiding their works
The self-portrait behind Van Gogh's "Peasant Woman's Head" also shows that even a seemingly spontaneous "crazy genius" like Van Gogh reused the canvas and rearranged and repeated himself, painting on both the front and back and showing the better side. While artists themselves may not admit it, they all want their work to be seen by others. Perhaps Van Gogh understood that flowers, the night sky, and local life resonate more than self-reflection and performance. Exploring oneself is a necessary artistic stage for the artist, but not for the audience.
A self-portrait of Van Gogh hidden behind The Peasant Woman's Head
This discovery also refutes Van Gogh's (and artists in general) viewed art as an instinctive emotionalist, producing art through cathartic creative impulses. Van Gogen is the representative of the "instinctive emotionalist", who is supported by a powerful myth and portrayed as a genius with an unfair fate and doomed to failure. He is crazy and gifted, capricious and fragile, a freak who is not recognized by the world, his self-beliefs are almost delusional, and his temperament oscillates between ecstasy and frustration.
If you're also an artist or creator, seeing the work behind or on the bottom of Van Gogh and Modigliani canvases will resonate. Even names revered by art history can be discarded halfway through their work. Or maybe they just find the work boring and not worth continuing.
Beautiful and emotionally effusive works of art that can continue to move viewers of different eras for thousands of years. But its birth is often the result of constant boredom, adjustment, and repetition. The road to genius is fraught with mediocre attempts, which may be on the back of the canvas and quickly negated by themselves.
Van Gogh, The Potato Eater, Study Sketch, 1885
If you're an artist, your studio is the office, and from ideation, you have to think about the work for a long time, adjusting it repeatedly before you make a decent work. The discovery led the public to look at Van Gogh again as a "dedicated artist." Even if he has not "succeeded" in his life, he has a sensitivity and does not always produce perfect works in the burst of creativity and emotion. They tried some of the drawings, realized it didn't work, and tried something else. Van Gogh did what all of us do– trying to show an unknown sense of self, as well as self-denial and criticism.
Van Gogh, The Head of the Peasant Woman, 1885
In van Gogh's case, the discovery of this "hidden" self-portrait also dissolves the art historian's tendencies towards his saints. Its positive "Peasant Woman's Head" is also not an authoritative and classic work, but one of a series of research and study works conducted on the locals when creating "The Potato Eater".
Van Gogh, The Potato Eater, 1885
In fact, no one has yet said that the rediscovered portrait would be an illuminating work if restored. But the reason why the discoveries of Van Gogh and Modigliani have attracted so much attention may be because of their novelty and rarity; Every piece of news has a tantalizing impact on the brand values of "Van Gogh" or "Modigliani". Van Gogh as an individual, Van Gogh as an artist, and Van Gogh under the industrial assembly line are three distinct entities. Every appearance of "Van Gogh" involves a seller's market, but also involves historians, critics, scholars, and the constant study and intensification of the importance of "Van Gogh". The same is true of other artists.
Van Gogh, Self-Portrait in a Hat, September-October 1887
More than a century ago, in 1890, van Gogh, who was only 37 years old, was believed to have shot himself. His life was dark, and his works were sold after his death. He may have hardly imagined that he is now world-famous and his works are insanely expensive (starry night in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York is estimated at $100 million). Modigliani died in 1920 at the age of 36 and was penniless.
At that time, they were willful and non-conformist, and they must be surprised to see the global art world and media frenzy for self-portraits of poor artists. The van Gogh self-portrait that was discovered was completed in a farmhouse by a man who suffered and starved during his lifetime. What they offer to the world is not an unknown legend, but a human understanding of the artist and the revelation of the ideas of his work.
Note: This article is compiled from The Guardian author Bidisha (BBC, Channel 4 and Sky News announcer, critic and journalist "The Beauty of the 'New' Van Gogh Lies In Entering the Way Genius Works" and the Associated Press report from Haifa, Israel, "The Unknown Modigliani Sketch Hides Under a Hat-Wearing Body"
Editor-in-Charge: Weihua Gu
Proofreader: Ding Xiao