9 Artists Whose Works Were Painted Over
1 UNKNOWN ARTIST (10th century), Kuan Lin Holding Lotus Blossom In 1953, officials of the esteemed Nelson Gallery of Art in Kansas City received a valuable twelfth-century Chinese wall painting that had been damaged during shipping. The horror of the officials was to be short-lived, for as restorer James Roth worked on the mural, he discovered a trace of blue paint underneath a layer of mud and rice husks. After careful, detailed work, a gracious goddess was exposed and identified as an outstanding example of tenth-century painting. It was hailed as one of the greatest Oriental art discoveries in recent years.
2 GIOVANNI BELLINI (1430?–1516); TITIAN (1477–1576), Feast of the Gods It had long been known that the renowned Renaissance painter Titian altered Feast of the Gods, a painting by his teacher,Giovanni Bellini. When the painting was X-rayed in the 1950s, it was discovered that Titian had also painted over several principal figures, altered the composition, and in essence changed the very content of the masterpiece. Art historians now view the two masters’ artistry as enhancing the value of the canvas and consider the painting as two original works in one.
3 SANDRO BOTTICELLI (1444?–1510), Three Miracles St Zenobius During the cleaning of this fifteenth-century masterpiece, restorers at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art noted that a central portion of the painting had been painted over. Technicians using X-rays to examine the area discovered an image of two preserved skeletons lying in a coffin. As the painting had previously been owned by Sir William Abdy of London, it is believed that he had the skeletons painted over in deference to Victorian tastes.
4 LUCAS CRANACH (1472–1553), Charity In this painting of a nude woman nursing her child, puritanical sentiment triumphed over the artist’s intentions when a restorer painted a complete set of clothes on the woman. Later the clothing was removed, leaving the painting in its original state.
5 MICHELANGELO (1475–1564), charcoal drawings The world’s only group of mural sketches by the great Renaissance painter, sculptor and architect was found in late 1975 while chapel director Paolo Dal Poggetto was trying to devise an alternative route for moving tourist traffic through Florence’s Medici Chapel. Before opening up a storeroom as an exit to the street, restorer Sabino Giovannoni performed tests on the walls. Under several layers of whitewash and grime, he discovered more than 50 large drawings of the human form and one of a horse’s head, evidently Michelangelo’s record of past works and preliminary sketches of future projects. Art historians believe that Michelangelo, an outspoken Republican, may have rendered the sketches while hiding out from an assassin hired by the Medicis, who were purging Florence of any political opposition.
6 PAUL CÉZANNE (1839–1906), Portrait of a Peasant After recovering a stolen Cézanne, The Artist’s Sister, in 1962, the St Louis City Art Museum decided to have the painting cleaned and relined. Art conservator James Roth discovered another portrait on the back of the canvas. Painted while Cézanne was in his early 20s, the new portrait of a peasant raised the value of the original by $75,000. The canvas is mounted so that both portraits may be viewed.
7 MAURICE UTRILLO (1883–1955), Execution des Generaux Lecomte & Clement Thomas par les Communards a la Caserne de Chateau Rouge (a.k.a. La Caserne) The painting, an atypical work for Utrillo, provides a dispassionate view of two figures facing a firing squad during the 1871 Paris Commune uprising. The work was bought in Paris in April of 1994 for $87,400 and sold in June at Christie’s in London for $109,000. During the two intervening months, the rifles of the firing squad were painted over, apparently to eliminate the reference to an execution. Although Christie’s claimed that Utrillo experts Gilbert Petrides and Jean Fabris had authenticated La Caserne, both denied having been consulted before the London sale. Fabis added, ‘In my opinion, it’s a fake, as it was tampered with.’
8 ARSHILE GORKI (1905–48), aviation murals Two murals of an original 10 painted by Armenian-born artist Arshile Gorki were recovered in 1973 due to the efforts of Mrs Ruth Bowman, a Newark, New Jersey, art historian. Five years after the completion of the 10 murals – commissioned by the Works Progress Administration in 1937 – the Army Air Corps took over Newark Airport, which housed the murals, and put the first of 14 coats of whitewash over them. Every major art text published since 1948 claimed the murals had been lost, but Mrs Bowman decided to investigate the walls further and found two murals intact. The other eight paintings were destroyed when walls were torn down to expedite the installation of new radiators.
9 DAVID SALLE (1952– ), Jump In September 1980, the artists David Salle and Julian Schnabel traded paintings. The painting that Salle gave Schnabel, Jump, consists of two canvases mounted side by side. The right side portrayed a woman and a baby in a bedroom, the left side featured birds. Schnabel decided that the work was incomplete, so he painted Salle’s face in orange on the left panel. Salle was not initially pleased with Schnabel’s handiwork. When Schnabel first showed him the painting, Salle jumped up and wrestled him to the floor. They later reconciled and sold Jump as a joint work to collector Eugene Schwartz.
– E.H.C. & C.F.
8 Valuable Art Works Found Unexpectedly
1 IN A FARMER’S FIELD In 1820, a Greek peasant named Yorgos was digging in his field on the island of Milos when he unearthed several carved blocks of stone. He burrowed deeper and found four statues – three figures of Hermes and one of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Three weeks later, the Choiseul archaeological expedition arrived by ship, purchased the Aphrodite, and took it to France. Louis XVIII gave it the name Venus de Milo and presented it to the Louvre in Paris, where it became one of the most famous works of art in the world.
2 BENEATH A STREET On February 21, 1978, electrical workers were putting down lines on a busy street corner in Mexico City when they discovered a 20-ton stone bas-relief of the Aztec night goddess, Coyolxauhqui. It is believed to have been sculpted in the early fifteenth century and buried prior to the destruction of the Aztec civilisation by the Spanish conquistadors in 1521. The stone was moved 200 yards from the site to the Museum of the Great Temple.
3 IN A HOLE IN THE GROUND In 1978 more than 500 movies dating from 1903 to 1929 were dug out of a hole in the ground in Dawson City, Yukon. Under normal circumstances, the 35-mm nitrate films would have been destroyed, but the permafrost preserved them perfectly.
4 UNDER A BED Joanne Perez, the widow of vaudeville performer Pepito the Spanish Clown, cleaned out the area underneath her bed and discovered the only existing copy of the pilot for the TV series I Love Lucy. Pepito had coached Lucille Ball and had guest-starred in the pilot. Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz, had given the copy to Pepito as a gift in 1951 and it had remained under the bed for 30 years.
5 ON A WALL A middle-aged couple in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, asked an art prospector to appraise a painting in their home. While he was there he examined another painting that the couple had thought was a reproduction of a work by Vincent van Gogh. It turned out to be an 1886 original. On March 10, 1991, the painting Still Life with Flowers sold at auction for $1,400,000.
6 IN A TRUNK IN AN ATTIC In 1961 Barbara Testa, a Hollywood librarian, inherited six steamer trunks that had belonged to her grandfather James Fraser Gluck, a Buffalo, New York, lawyer who died in 1895. Over the next three decades she gradually sifted through the contents of the trunks, until one day in the autumn of 1990 she came upon 665 pages that turned out to be the original handwritten manuscript of the first half of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. The two halves of the great American novel were finally reunited at the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library.
7 AT A FLEA MARKET A Philadelphia financial analyst was browsing at a flea market in Adamstown, Pennsylvania, when he was attracted by a wooden picture frame. He paid four dollars for it. Back at his home, he removed the old torn painting in the frame and found a folded document between the canvas and the wood backing. It turned out to be a 1776 copy of the Declaration of Independence – one of 24 known to remain. On June 13, 1991, Sotheby’s auction house in New York sold the copy for $2,420,000.
8 MASQUERADING AS A BICYCLE RACK For years, employees of the God’s House Tower Archaeology Museum in Southampton, England, propped their bikes against a 27-inch black rock in the