[HN Gopher] The Klimt Color Enigma
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The Klimt Color Enigma
Author : emilwallner
Score : 62 points
Date : 2021-10-22 10:50 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (artsandculture.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (artsandculture.google.com)
| woodruffw wrote:
| 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).
| tartoran wrote:
| Mistery is like a magnet for the imagination. I personally like
| when a piece of the puzzle is missing: it makes us think.
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| Quick!!! We need some good PR! Push the Klimt story!
| kwelstr wrote:
| 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?
| jbaber wrote:
| 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."
| ambyra wrote:
| I can confirm it is terrible on both. What a great article
| though.
| egypturnash wrote:
| When I skipped down to the bottom of this page to look at the
| actual art under discussion, it gave me a popup that told me I
| had earnt a fucking _badge_ for reading this page all the way
| through.
|
| I hate this fucking future.
| Palomides wrote:
| 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
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Klimt is dead, and the originals are missing.
| Daub wrote:
| 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.
| woodruffw wrote:
| 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").
| aeturnum wrote:
| No, absolutely not.
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://hyperallergic.com/672345/vermeer-restoration-
| finally...
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28468802
| hairofadog wrote:
| 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])
|
| [0]: nothing, both literally and figuratively
| Palomides wrote:
| 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
| hairofadog wrote:
| Yep, good point.
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| The timing, considering it was posted by someone connected
| to Google and in light of recent news, seems suspect.
| canjobear wrote:
| They have human Klimt experts helping too.
| googlryas wrote:
| 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.
| tudorw wrote:
| "The algorithm is trained on 91749 artworks from Google Arts &
| Culture"
|
| I'd like to have a play with that, is it open or available?
| emilwallner wrote:
| Unfortunately not, but here are a few great public art
| datasets: https://www.artnome.com/art-data. Rijksmuseum and
| wikiart also have available datasets.
| emilwallner wrote:
| Thanks for the appreciation! I made the machine learning model
| and wrote the article, happy to answer any questions.
|
| 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
| boulos wrote:
| Awesome work! Btw, you could have also submitted this as Show
| HN :).
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| 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?
| emilwallner wrote:
| - Jurisprudence:
| https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/jurisprudence-
| recolo...
|
| - Philosophy:
| https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/philosophy-
| recolored...
|
| - Medicine: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/medicine-
| recolored-w...
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I'll repeat my question.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/TQIqFmb.png
| zvr wrote:
| Amazing work! Congratulations!
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(page generated 2021-10-23 23:01 UTC)