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Emily MacDonald-Korth, WUDPAC alumna and President
and Chief Conservator-Analyst of Longevity Art Preservation, has
discovered that artist Jean-Michel Basquiat hid secret drawings in his
artworks using invisible UV paint. From an article in the Art World
section of artnet.com:
Emily Macdonald-Korth, an art conservator in New York,
thought she was going in for a routine forensic job last month when a
client asked her to confirm that the Jean-Michel Basquiat painting he owned was in fact done in 1981, as he’d been told.
She planned to conduct pigment and elemental analyses, take
technical photographs, and look at the picture under UV and infrared
lights. It was all checking out normally until she brought out
her handheld UV flashlight, typically used to spot varnish or other
signs that a painting has undergone repair, and turned off the overhead
lights.
That’s when she saw them: drawings that Basquiat had made in invisible ink.
“I start looking at this thing and I see these arrows,”
Macdonald-Korth told artnet News. She flipped the lights back on to make
sure she wasn’t imagining things and the arrows disappeared. She
flipped the lights off again and there they were: two arrows drawn in
what looked like black-light crayon, virtually identical to other arrows
drawn visibly on the canvas with red and black oil sticks. “I’ve never
seen anything like it,” she said. “He basically did a totally secret
part of this painting.”