Israel, a painting by Amedeo Modigliani reveals sketches invisible to the naked eye thanks to X-rays

Under the surface of a painting by Amedeo Modigliani that is part of the collection of the Hecht Museum in Haifa, Israel, titled Nude with Hat, dating from 1908, three sketches have been discovered through X-rays. The work features on one side a nude model with a hat, which gives the painting its name, while on the other side is an upside-down portrait of the painter’s friend Maud Abrantès. Back in 2012, however, near Maud Abrantès’s neck and breast, curators at the Israeli museum noticed two blue eyes, the outline of a face and a hat.

On the occasion of an exhibition planned for this fall that the Barnes Foundation will devote to Modigliani in Philadelphia, curators at the Hecht Museum in Haifa thought they would subject the painting to X-ray analysis to try to gain more insight into the figure hidden beneath the Abrantès portrait: in addition to the hidden woman wearing a hat, two other portraits, namely that of a man and another of a woman with her hair pulled back in a bun, were discovered underneath the Nude with Hat, on the opposite side of the canvas, completely invisible to the naked eye.

Curators at the Israeli museum site have advanced the idea that this canvas was a kind of"sketchbook on canvas" of a Modigliani still in search of artistic expression, thus still in the formative stage.

Inna Berkowits, art historian at the Hecht Museum, described the discovery as something truly extraordinary and exciting. “Through X-rays, we are able to make this inanimate object speak,” she said stated.

Pictured is Amedeo Modigliani’s Nude with Hat.

Israel, a painting by Amedeo Modigliani reveals sketches invisible to the naked eye thanks to X-rays

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