Skip to main content

AI & X-Rays Recover Lost Artworks Underneath Paintings by Picasso & Modigliani

You see above a painting by Amedeo Modigliani, a portrait of the artist’s lover Beatrice Hastings, unseen by the public until its rediscovery just this year. Or at any rate, some see that: in another sense, the image is a new or almost-new artistic creation, based on X-rays of Modigliani’s Portrait of a Girl. Underneath the paint that makes up that celebrated work lie traces enough to establish the presence of a different, earlier one beneath. But only now, after the employment of neural networks fed with enough of the artist’s acknowledged work to recognize and replicate his signature style, do we have a sense of what it could have looked like.

“Anthony Bourached and George Cann, both PhD candidates, are heading the ‘NeoMasters’ project through a company called Oxia Palus,” writes The Guardian‘s Dalya Alberge. “They have ambitious plans to rediscover further hidden paintings on canvases that were reused by artists, who were perhaps too impoverished to buy supplies or dissatisfied with initial compositions.”

Modigliani was certainly impecunious enough to have done so more than once, and his relationship with Hastings — a long affair that was volatile even by the standards of the early 20th-century Parisian bohemia they inhabited — did provide material for other portraits.

Specialists, respectively, in neuroscience and the surface of Mars (their company’s name refers to a region of that planet), Bourached and Cann have proven enterprising in this art-oriented endeavor. “A 3D-printed physical rendering of their creation, complete with computer-simulated ‘brushstrokes’ and texture, will soon go on display at London’s Lebenson Gallery as part of the duo’s ‘NeoMasters’ project,” writes Nora McGreevy at Smithsonian.com. Earlier this year, McGreevy also covered Oxia Palus’ digitally assisted recovery of a Barcelona landscape possibly painted by the Spanish poet, playwright, and artist Santiago Rusiñol — before it was painted over by Pablo Picasso.

This discovery actually goes back to 1992, when conservators first determined the existence of another image beneath Picasso’s little-known La Miséreuse accroupie, or The Crouching Beggar. “Researchers suspect that Picasso used the mountains in Rusiñol’s landscape to shape the contours of his female subject’s back,” writes McGreevy. “A 2018 X-ray of that lesser-known work by the Art Gallery of Toronto provided Oxia Palus what they needed to start work on their A.I.-assisted recreation. Not only did Bourached and Cann 3D print 100 physical copies of the final product, they linked each one to a unique non-fungible token (NFT), the new kind of digital artifact that has become something of a craze in the art world — surely an unimaginable afterlife for these images Modigliani and Picasso must have assumed they’d obliterated for good.

via Hyperallergic

Related Content:

Original Portrait of the Mona Lisa Found Beneath the Paint Layers of da Vinci’s Masterpiece

Scientists Create a New Rembrandt Painting, Using a 3D Printer & Data Analysis of Rembrandt’s Body of Work

Short Film Takes You Inside the Recovery of Andy Warhol’s Lost Computer Art

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

AI & X-Rays Recover Lost Artworks Underneath Paintings by Picasso & Modigliani is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3vOn33R
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more