Two Picassos revealed

Picasso painted "Woman Ironing" when he was in his 20s. And like so many struggling young artists he often reused old canvases. He first began painting a portrait of a man with a mustache; abandoned it and several years later turned the canvas upside down and painted the image of a skeletal woman ironing over it. The ghost of the man underneath was first detected with an infrared camera in 1989. "Woman Ironing" was recently cleaned and restored by the Guggenheim Museum and is now on display as part of the exhibition, "Picasso Black and White."http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/arts/design/under-a-picasso-painting-another-picasso-painting.html?ref=design&_r=0

Download Hundreds of Free Art Catalogs from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Earlier this year, the Guggenheim Museum put online 65 modern art books, giving you free access to books introducing the work of Alexander Calder, Edvard Munch, Francis Bacon, Gustav Klimt & Egon Schiele, and Kandinsky. Now, just a few short months later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has launched MetPublications, a portal that will “eventually offer access to nearly all books, Bulletins, and Journals” published by the Met since 1870.

Of the many resources you can explore, here’s one obvious highlight: MetPublications now makes available 370 out-of-print titles, including lots of informative and visually-packed art catalogs from the museum’s past exhibitions.

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How to incease your creative productivity

These days, more and more artists and creative freelancers are working from home studios, often fitting in their practice around other work and life commitments. This requires an incredible amount of self-motivation in order to stay on top of your work, and to keep your practice going.This article looks at time-management techniques, how to overcome distractions and find out how other creatives make it work.

The bookcover archive

Sometimes, it turns out, it's all right to judge a book by its cover. The Book Cover Archive, run and maintained by Ben Pieratt and Eric Jacobsen, allows visitors to do just that. It bills itself as created "for the appreciation and categorization of excellence in book cover design," and a quick glance over the selection offered confirms its success. The archive website features over 1,300 cleanly displayed book covers in a variety of designs, from simple text to elaborate photo collages. Clicking on any one of the covers will take readers to a page with some more information about the cover, such as the publication date, the genre, and of course, the designer.http://bookcoverarchive.com/