WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists and art experts have found a hidden painting beneath one of Pablo Picasso’s first masterpieces, The Blue Room, using advances in infrared imagery to reveal a bow-tied man with his face resting on his hand. Now the question that conservators at The Phillips Collection in Washington hope to answer is simply: Who is he?

It’s a mystery that’s fueling new research about the 1901 painting created early in Picasso’s career while he was working in Paris at the start of his distinctive blue period of melancholy subjects.

Curators and conservators revealed their findings for the first time to the Associated Press last week. Over the past five years, experts from The Phillips Collection, National Gallery of Art, Cornell University and Delaware’s Winterthur Museum have developed a clearer image of the mystery picture under the surface. It’s a portrait of an unknown man painted in a vertical composition by one of the 20th century’s great artists.

“It’s really one of those moments that really makes what you do special,” said Patricia Favero, the conservator at The Phillips Collection who pieced together the best infrared image yet of the man’s face. “The second reaction was, ‘well, who is it?’ We’re still working on answering that question.”

In 2008, improved infrared imagery revealed for the first time a man’s bearded face resting on his hand with three rings on his fingers. He’s dressed in a jacket and bow tie. A technical analysis confirmed the hidden portrait is a work Picasso likely painted just before The Blue Room, curators said. After the portrait was discovered, conservators have been using other technology to scan the painting for further insights.

Conservators long suspected there might be something under the surface of The Blue Room, which has been part of The Phillips Collection in Washington since 1927. Brushstrokes on the piece clearly don’t match the composition that depicts a woman bathing in Picasso’s studio. A conservator noted the odd brushstrokes in a 1954 letter, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that an X-ray of the painting first revealed a fuzzy image of something under the picture. It wasn’t clear, though, that it was a portrait.

“When he had an idea, you know, he just had to get it down and realize it,” curator Susan Behrends Frank told the AP, revealing Picasso had hurriedly painted over another complete picture. “He could not afford to acquire new canvasses every time he had an idea that he wanted to pursue. He worked sometimes on cardboard because canvass was so much more expensive.”

Scholars are researching who this man might be and why Picasso painted him. They have ruled out the possibility that it was a self-portrait. One possible figure is the Paris art dealer Ambrose Villard who hosted Picasso’s first show in 1901. But there’s no documentation and no clues left on the canvass, so the research continues.

Favero has been collaborating with other experts to scan the painting with multi-spectral imaging technology and X-ray fluorescence intensity mapping to try to identify and map the colors of the hidden painting. They would like to recreate a digital image approximating the colors Picasso used.

Curators are planning the first exhibit focused on The Blue Room as a seminal work in Picasso’s career for 2017. It will examine the revelation of the man’s portrait beneath the painting, as well as other Picasso works and his engagement with other artists.

For now, The Blue Room is part of a tour to South Korea through early 2015 as the research continues.

Hidden pictures have been found under other important Picasso paintings. A technical analysis of La Vie at the Cleveland Museum of Art revealed Picasso significantly reworked the painting’s composition. And conservators found a portrait of a mustached man beneath Picasso’s painting Woman Ironing at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan.

Dorothy Kosinski, the director of The Phillips Collection, said new knowledge about Picasso and his process can be discovered through the high-tech collaboration among museums.

“Our audiences are hungry for this. It’s kind of detective work. It’s giving them a doorway of access that I think enriches, maybe adds mystery, while allowing them to be part of a piecing together of a puzzle,” she said. “The more we can understand, the greater our appreciation is of its significance in Picasso’s life.”

Copyright 2014 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Bergamot Station Arts Center, which opened in 1994, is home to the largest concentration of galleries in the western United States, an auction house, nonprofit organizations, a museum, a theater and a writing institution.

If the city of Santa Monica proceeds with
 redevelopment plans as they currently exist, Bergamot Station will be destroyed. In serious jeopardy are dozens of business owners and hundreds of employees and artists, according to the Bergamot Station Gallery Cultural Association.

Redevelopment on the city-owned eight-acre site would result in the complex, with its distinctive, loft-style buildings, being razed.

Meanwhile, Santa Monica City Council has postponed a vote to select a development team for the local landmark.

Bergamot Stateion began its life in 1875 as a trolley car stop for the Red Line, which ran from Los Angeles to the Santa Monica Pier. When the trolley cars stopped running in 1953, the warehouses on the site were converted to commercial use, first as a celery packing operation, then an ice-making plant, and finally as a factory that made water heaters.

In 1989 the city purchased the Bergamot Station property from Southern Pacific Transportation Co. With its massive corrugated metal buildings, it was a natural for the display of large canvases and other artworks, and a plan to develop the property as a campus-like complex of arts-related businesses was enacted. In September 1994, Bergamot Station began its new life as a center for contemporary art galleries and design firms.

Yet after 20 years of continued success as an arts center, the city is considering plans for redevelopment.

A statement from the Bergamot Station Gallery Cultural Association reads: “We do not want another shopping mall to replace this unique and historic complex, which has thrived against all odds for two decades while providing exceptional 
arts programming and community service. We, as over 40 art galleries and cultural businesses, respectfully cannot support Santa Monica’s current … plan for re-development. It threatens the heart and soul of Bergamot Station as we know it.”

Bergamot Station supporters are asked to sign the petition. Go to:

http://www.change.org/petitions/santa-monica-city-council-and-arts-commission-save-bergamot-station-arts-center-from-overdevelopment.

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The intricacies of the chandelier covered in European crystals hanging from a gold chain in the rotunda. The often-unnoticed gold plaques of bulls and boars above the doorways in the Doric vestibule. The one-of-a-kind gold dome and marble-covered interior.

“When you’re in here, it’s almost like you’re back in ancient Greece – even down to the proportions of the columns,” Wilkins said, standing in the state Capitol building. “But people very seldom notice some of it.”

For Wilkins and his wife, Ann Thomas Wilkins, both retired art history professors, it’s as much about the building itself as it is about the man who designed it: Cass Gilbert.

The Wilkinses recently authored Cass Gilbert’s West Virginia State Capitol – a close examination of Gilbert, known as one of the most influential architects of the 20th century, and his creation of the nationally recognized West Virginia state Capitol building.

Gilbert also designed the United States Supreme Court Building and the Woolworth Building in New York City – the tallest building in the world when it was constructed in 1913.

But the West Virginia Capitol was a project close to his heart, David Wilkins said. He turned down other offers to design state capitols at the time, and took dozens of train rides between New York City and Charleston in the preliminary stages of the project.

The book is full of little-known facts about Gilbert and his intentions for West Virginia’s Capitol. For example, he fought tirelessly to build the gold dome despite criticisms that it was a waste of money on something that was more symbolic than functional. Symbolism can be seen all throughout the building, Wilkins told a crowd gathered there for a tour and book signing June 10.

The book also provides a comprehensive look at the history of the construction process and its execution, featuring hundreds of photos.

“It’s still doing what he intended it to do – enhance the state’s reputation. It emphasizes that West Virginia is an equal to any in the nation,” Wilkins said. “It’s a beacon in this place.”

West Virginia University hosted the event to celebrate the book, which was published by the WVU Press.

WVU President Gordon Gee spoke about Gilbert’s “eclectic vision,” saying the building is an especially great feat considering it was built in the midst of the Great Depression.

“It has been the symbol of West Virginia – always rising, even in our darkest days,” Gee said.

Other state officials attended the book launch, including West Virginia Board of Education President Gayle Manchin, former governor Gaston Caperton and Sen. Brooks McCabe (D-Kanawha.)

“We did this through the Depression. We built a nationally prominent, really in many ways a world-class facility, in the middle of the Depression in the state of West Virginia. We set the bar high, we stayed with it even when we had to have skirmishes between the North and the South. … It was just one conflict after another,” McCabe said. “But this structure represents West Virginia – what it has been, what it is and what it can be. It makes me think that maybe the best is still ahead of us, and we have the capitol to prove it.”

For more information on the book, visit http://www.wvupressonline.com.

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Information from: The Charleston Gazette, http://www.wvgazette.com

Copyright 2014 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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