Both areas of the flesh tones were painted with a complex pigment mixture containing white, red, brown and green pigments.
Even more convincing than in other cases, the non-invasive multi-technique approach appears here, in the case of an extraordinarily complex painting, the first and unavoidable tool to acquire information on the chemistry of the palette toward the understanding of the painting technique.
A mellow oil on wood from 1929, "Untitled (Cubist Composition)," melds geometric and biomorphic forms in tans, grays and yellows, and a smaller, more complex painting of 1928, "Untitled (Abstract Composition)," is a sophisticated layering of form on form a la Picasso and Braque.
"Reflection (What Does Your Soul Look Like)" (pictured), an exquisitely rendered, psychologically complex painting from 1996 by Peter Doig, a British artist, was consigned by César Reyes, a Puerto Rican psychiatrist who owns a number of the artist's works.
"It's a very, very complicated, spatially complex painting," Burnham said, "so that the Devil seems to be connected to the scorched earth, whereas the Christ figure seems attached to these lighter rocks and the golden sky".
In lively prose unusual for such a scholarly work, Gibson discusses every factor that contributes to the grip of this complex painting, completed in 1564.
In a dark painting he is costumed as his fellow Spaniard El Greco, and he painted his take on Velasquez's visually complex painting, "Las Meninas".
"The New Vortex Plunges Into the Heart of the Present," the show's most complex painting, below, takes its title from the Vorticist manifesto, signed in 1914 by a group of British artists.
