- This work will be part of an exhibition at the Museum of Rome starting from 27th Oct, where you can also see Klimt's 'Portrait of a Lady' that was missing for almost 23 years
Is there anywhere the actual restored artworks in the article can be seen without having to navigate a lot of Web 3.0 gimmickry, or without having to scale up some 2000-era images the size of postage stamps?
Posting that on imgur.com has to be one of the most unintentionally ironic Web things I've seen.
That URL redirected me to one without the .png extension, which then proceeded to do a bunch of JS things and loading third-party resources, until about 5-10 seconds later I was presented with an empty page other than a "Log in with Google account?" overlay in the top right. :D
I wish I could share my screen recording, but even though I removed my cookies, it still somehow knew my account details.
Then, when I clicked your link a second time, it just loaded the image.
Interesting, I've never seen any behavior like that on imgur. They're usually my go-to host for temporary images. Sorry for the inadvertent gaslighting, but now you really get my point...
For at least 3 years now, probably closer to 5 or more, Imgur have been doing deceptive redirects for "mobile" devices, gaslighting them while leaving "desktop" alone. In fact, it's nearly impossible to get the raw image file on Android/iOS.
I think my older OS was tagged as "mobile" accidentally.
What is shown on the Web is often not very accurate for fine-art color. Are the colorized versions posted somewhere in 48 bit depth in a wide-gamut color space?
Great work, I greatly admire Klimt's art and these paintings were such an important part of his artistic development and so sad they were destroyed on purpose so the other side wouldn't have them.
That website is a pain to read on a desktop computer thou... maybe ok on mobile?
I'm a big Klimt fan and am very impressed with this (especially Jurisprudence). I was thinking, though: "this is so hard to see on mobile. Maybe better on desktop."
Normally I roll my eyes at these kinds of ML applications (I've seen a lot of haphazard applications of upscaling and auto-colorization to archival footage, resulting in really garish and unrealistic transformations), but this effort appears to have been thoughtfully performed (with references to Klimt's contemporaneous works and living experts).
does anyone else feel this is disrespectful to artists? having a computer make up colors to apply to art? it's completely devoid of the human intent that chose the original colors
I empathize with this position, but I think this situation is closer to authentic restoration (which the art world is okay with, generally speaking) than an unguided machine transformation of a human work.
(I've visited just about every Klimt exhibit in Vienna, including the one that these B&W photographs are in. I think they've done a remarkably faithful job here, down to accurately capturing the subperiod of Klimt's "gold period").
I think that one has to be careful with labeling - these works are highly researched guesses based on lots of sources but are not "the article itself." But I think this process, where they are trying to be a thorough as possible in guessing what colors Klimt might have used mechanistically, is much more respectful than other techniques. Consider the recent Vermeer restoration[1] (hn discussion at [2]): 'restoring' the painting in this way alters the actual article and could be altering the intent of the artist. I support the work, but I think there's a basic element of uncertainty to it.
At the end of the day, if you don't want to accept the machine's guess at the colors Klimt used, you don't need to! You have access to the same archival documentation of what his lost paintings looked like as everyone else.
It seems different when we're just trying to guess what the actual colors were, since the artist is dead and the painting is destroyed, and we only have a black and white copy + textual description of the painting.
Speaking only for myself, no! It’s just borrowing and playing with ideas, which artists do all the time. (I have an education in fine arts, for whatever it’s worth [0])
I'm fine with playing with ideas, but the fact that it's google smacks of "look, the computer can replicate/replace the human", which has a very different vibe than, say, Dali coloring Goya
Not exactly made up. Having only the lightness values to start with, The task is to define the hue and saturation. Though in theory there is no way to know for certain what they originally were, in practice certain lightness values are associated with some hues more than others. Also, saturation values tend to follow lightness values quite closely. Add to that the fact that Klimt (like most painters) employed a habitual pallet, you are half was to a good guess.
Unfortunately not, but here are a few great public art datasets: https://www.artnome.com/art-data. Rijksmuseum and wikiart also have available datasets.
Here's more information:
- 3D Gallery: https://artsandculture.google.com/pocketgallery/kAUxTZBD8McZ...
- Video overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xYpIM_BVTI
- This work will be part of an exhibition at the Museum of Rome starting from 27th Oct, where you can also see Klimt's 'Portrait of a Lady' that was missing for almost 23 years
- More Klimt artworks and articles: https://artsandculture.google.com/project/klimt-vs-klimt