Specialists of the Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics have solved the mystery of the picture attributed to Leger

VENICE. In the early 1970s, Douglas Cooper, a friend of the famous art collector, American Peggy Guggenheim and creative expert Fernand Henri Léger, expressed doubts about the authenticity of this artist’s paintings in the collection Peggy. Since then, the painting, considered part of the famous Contraste de Formes series, has not been cataloged or exhibited at the Guggenheim Foundation, which inherited the complete collection of the museum’s niece, Solomon R. Guggenheim.

For decades, art scholars, experts and experts could not come to a final conclusion regarding the authenticity of the work. And now, nuclear physicists from the Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) using a particle accelerator proved that the canvas could not be written by the artist.

The final decision was helped by the effect known as the “bomb peak” — a temporary significant increase in the concentration of radioactive carbon-14 in the Earth’s atmosphere, caused by massive nuclear tests conducted in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Then radiocarbon from the atmosphere entered all living organisms, including growing flax and cotton, from which canvas for painting is made. The peak of radioactivity occurred in the mid-60s, after which, the level of radiocarbon began to decline sharply, until it reached the previous level (thanks to the signing of numerous international pacts and treaties, nuclear tests were banned or significantly limited).

Researchers measured the content of this isotope in a fragment of an unpainted canvas of a controversial work that was attributed to a series created by the French modernist artist between 1913 and 1914. Then, the results of the analysis were compared with the “bomb peak” curve and other materials produced in that period, as well as before and after it. Thus, based on the decay rate of radiocarbon and its actual content in the sample, scientists were able to date the canvas attributed to Leger paintings. The test results allowed physicists with full confidence to claim that the canvas for the canvas was produced after 1959, that is, at least four years after Leger’s death in 1955.

This method was first used to ascertain the authenticity of a work of art, but has great prospects in the future. True, he will work only in relation to those works that were written during the “bomb peak”. The research was conducted at the Laboratory of Environmental and Cultural Heritage Sites (LABEC) in Florence, in partnership with the Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. The results of the examination of the INFN department for the study and diagnosis of cultural heritage were published in the European Physical Journal.

Philip Rylands, director of the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, thanked the INFN team of physicists and LABEC experts: “After forty years of doubt about the authenticity of this picture, I felt relief. Thanks to the use of innovative scientific technologies, the cloud of uncertainty was finally dispelled and the opinion of Douglas Cooper, who won the well-deserved recognition of gourmets of art, was confirmed. ”

Anna Sidorova © Gallerix.ru