Google Arts & Culture has launched a new interactive hub called “Klimt vs. Klimt – The Man of Contradictions,” which will offer visitors insight into Gustav Klimt’s biography, artistic inspiration, legacy, and more, along with scholarly articles penned by experts at Austria’s top institutions, including the Belvedere and the Wien Museum.
As part of its efforts, Google also digitally recreated three of Klimt’s lost works from 1899, using artificial intelligence technology to colorize black-and-white photography of the works. The three paintings—Medicine, Philosophy, and Jurisprudence—together form the “Faculty Paintings,” which was commissioned by the University of Vienna. Upon the works’ unveiling, university officials deemed them “pornographic” and “perverse.” They were ultimately sold to a private buyer.
In 1945, during the final days of World War II in Europe, the paintings were lost in a fire, and they now survive only in the form of black-and-white photographs. Using a huge data set (1 million pictures of the real world and 91,749 image of artworks by various artists), the algorithm ascertained a sense of skin tones and the hues of the sky from the real world images, and a sense of composition, object boundaries, and textures from the paintings. Added to that initial data set were 80 full-color reproductions of Klimt paintings, meant to key the algorithm in to the Vienna Secession artist’s style. The resulting AI-colored images provide what might be the closest we will ever get to see a complete image of those lost paintings.
In a statement, Smola said, “The result for me was surprising because we were able to color it even in the places where we had no knowledge, with machine learning we have good assumptions that Klimt used certain colors.”