Google AI recreates Gustav Klimt paintings destroyed during WWII
A machine learning masterpiece
The painter’s palette
AI colorization of black and white photos has been criticized forinaccurately depicting the past.
Paintings add extra complexity to the process, as artists often don’t intend to replicate reality.
Klimt, for instance, may paint the sky with a shocking shade of green rather than a conventional blue.
To understand these choices, the Google team turned to Dr Franz Smola, a curator at Belvedere.
Smola collectedcomments about theFaculty Paintingsartworks from news articles, exhibition catalogs, and letters. This information was then compared to Klimt’s surviving artworks.
Smola discovered, for example, a description of “golden snakes” in the hair of three women inJurisprudence.Golden snakes also appear in Klimt’sBeethoven Frieze.
As the two artworks were made during the same time, the team assumed Klimt used a similar tone of gold.
This research was used to develop an algorithm that replicated Klimt’s style.
The artist’s model
The algorithm was first trained on a collection of 91,749 artworks, which allowed the model to understand general aspects of painting. works.
Next, the algorithm was trained on Klimt’s own paintings in order to replicate his colorization style.
The researchers alsodeveloped an interface to interact with the algorithm. This was used to apply reference colors from Smola’s research to the artworks.
“If we know that a certain object has a specific color, we add that color directly to the black and white photos,” saidEmil Wallner, a creative coder at the Google Arts & Culture Lab, ina blog post.
We may never know how well the reproductions replicate the originals. But they’re the closest people have come to experiencingtheFaculty Paintingsfor more than 70 years.
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Story byThomas Macaulay
Thomas is a senior reporter at TNW. He covers European tech, with a focus on AI, cybersecurity, and government policy.Thomas is a senior reporter at TNW. He covers European tech, with a focus on AI, cybersecurity, and government policy.
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