Van Gogh has a special meaning for me, because it's the first time I was fascinated with a painting.
To put things into context: my mom is an art historian, and when I was a kid she'd regularly drag me to museums. I remember being bored out of my mind, with only the cool architecture of the museums themselves to mildly entertain me.
To this day I'm pretty uninterested in the classics
Years later, in my late 20s, I went to the National Gallery in London, and saw one of Van Gogh's "Wheatfield with Cypresses" [1] there, and for the first time a classical painting struck me as beautiful. Maybe it's the pastels, maybe it was the texture of the gouache (which no digital picture reproduces, you'd need a detailed 3D model), I just stood there entranced by this painting.
I bought a (stupidly overpriced) print of it at the gift shop, and to this day it's still the only classical painting I can recognize a love for.
Sadly, that particular painting isn't part of this digitized collection, since the collection is from the Amsterdam Museum, not from London's National Gallery.
As nice as this is, it would have been even better if they’d used an understandable CC licence instead of the custom non-commercial sub-A4 one they’ve decided on. There are at least a couple of museums now that have licenced their entire digital artworks as CC0[1][2], and I’ve been talking to Munchmuseet in Oslo recently who are planning to licence their entire new digitised collection[3] as CC4 (free use with attribution).
It’s important for me as I need PD (or CC0, which is functionally equivalent) to pick decent cover art for Standard Ebooks[4] works. As it is we usually spend hours hunting through pre-1923 art books on Hathi for the perfect piece, and CC0 collections make that much much easier.
I really don't understand your comment, and all subsequent responses along the same line. The digitized van Gogh paintings are perfect copies of the original public domain works. For the US, Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. [1] makes it perfectly clear that the images are not protected by copyright, and there is similar law and legislation in Europe.
What do you mean with the ability of the museums to choose a license for the paintings, and what is the "sub-A4" license you refer to?
I think the UK has mostly settled for cc-by-sa (attribution share-alike) which is at least tolerable. Non-commercial is a minefield even for public sector usage.
Woah. In an ML class I took last fall we got to design our own classification challenge problems that the entire class then competed on.
The one our group made used this exact dataset (the museum website)! We called it VANGOGHORNO haha. We basically pulled the images from the collection and mixed them with non-Van Gogh paintings. It was surprisingly a very learnable dataset, the top two teams got around 97% accuracy and many teams got to 90%. We resized the images and included paintings from vaguely similar styles like impressionism so we were surprised people did that well. I think the top team used some kind of transfer learning to identify entities in the paintings and learned from that.
It also is a dataset where cheating is quite easy. A google search may quickly turn up items you left out of the training set.
Do you know whether any teams did this (could even have happened by accident, if people googled to find different views of paintings, and accidentally included pictures not in the training set)?
Slightly off-topic, a big part of seeing a painting in real life is seeing the structure and layers of brush strokes. It's a long shot but does anyone know if any work has been done to create depth maps of paintings and possibly combine them with scans?
I wonder how they are colormanaging these? I sure hope only the web versions are (presumably) sRGB, and they have wide-gamut versions for other uses, especially for their prints. I imagine they do, they are professionals after-all, and the collection and digitization overall seems pretty well done.
If anyone's interested, I made a set of apps that turns your macOS desktop into a rotating art gallery, given an existing directory of images. It's all done in a completely native way, so you don't have to worry about weird software interactions or future compatibility: http://archagon.net/blog/2018/05/02/a-native-art-gallery-for...
Anyway, I'm looking forward to throwing this batch in there. Hope somebody sticks them all in a torrent soon.
This is quite an amazing collection, and great for archiving purposes.
But, (I can't help myself), I am conflicted about the digitization of museums/artists/artworks. Seeing a work of art, let alone one of the greats, is something that should be experienced in person. Reducing it to pixels for instant digestion is a sub-optimal way to experience it.
Granted, this is amazing to research and exposure, and for distribution to those who wouldn't normally be able to see it - but I fear that it takes something away from the art.
If you are involved in the contemporary art scene at all, you may have noticed that works are beginning to become 'instagram' friendly - from paintings that look good on the internet but are ultimately shallow, 'installations' that generate a lot of hype and look good on your Story (a la Infinity Mirrors [0]), to hordes of people taking selfies with the Mona Lisa instead of appreciating it [1].
Maybe that's just the way things will progress in the Art world. But, imo, it is more important than ever to appreciate and continue creating the physical, tangible, beauty of art in an ever increasing digital world.
I kind of disagree - many paintings are actually better experienced on print or online than in real life. Just take your example of Mona Lisa - you will get a better impression of the art from a good reproduction than from watching it behind glass surrounded by hordes of tourists at the Louvre. It is a relatively small painting and you can't even get close! Many classic paintings are awkwardly placed with bad lighting and so on. Some museums hang paintings in multiple rows, so you have to be a giraffe to enjoy half of them. Digitalization on the other hand is typically done under perfect light and viewing conditions.
In any case, for most ordinary people it is totally unrealistic to travel to museums all over the world to enjoy the real paintings.
I don't disagree with the sentiment, but based on your comment, I can only guess you're fortunate to have access to "great" art.
For people who don't live close to huge cities with big museums, the diversity and availability of art could be very low. Digitizing art and making it publicly available is a step forward for those people.
I manage the digitization program for a university library system (though I'm leaving this role very soon).
Yes, digitization is inherently a transformation and remediation of the work. This means that yes, something is taken away. But the value add, in my opinion, is so great that it's very well worth the money and time that goes into it.
My favorite work of art ever is Friedrich's The Monk by the Sea [0]: it fills me with emotion every time I see its digital facsimile. I hope one day that I'll be able to see it in person, but for now, it's accessible to me and billions of others to appreciate and enjoy.
> works are beginning to become 'instagram' friendly
Respectfully, I highly disagree with this sentiment. In my personal experience, I'm seeing just as many artists pushing back on reproducibility and the "prettiness" of art as there are folks trying to create works that look good on office walls or on Instagram stories.
> to hordes of people taking selfies with the Mona Lisa instead of appreciating it
Finally, again, I respectfully disagree. Who's to say that I can't enjoy art and take a selfie with it too? Many people like to add some sort of lens, most frequently their phone camera, to their experiences at concerts, museums, and galleries. I don't think anyone's qualified to tell those folks that they're doing it wrong.
I minored in Art History and have a real love of art. I obviously studied using digitized work and still was able to fall in love and appreciate the majesty of it. But then I was in Florence and went to see David (something I had seen a ton) and wow it took my breath away. It was so much more amazing and awe inspiring.
Nevertheless, I still see such an amazing hope in having these works digitized at least to give people some perspective at the range of many great artists and to allow the art to inhabit a person's life in the way they want which is what the artist would want. And hopefully if they love it enough and it impacts them then they can go see it in person.
I agree that seeing a work in real life is better. But sub-optimal viewing of art is better that no viewing of art, and many art students have learned their art history via books and slides even before digitized art was a thing.
As far as the contemporary scene, it will change and evolve, as it always does. It you don't like the current trends, start something new. After all, the last hundred years have seen a decent collection of deliberate art movements where a group of people consciously came together to make statements with their arts and acts. There is no reason to let digital trends stop that.
> Reducing it to pixels for instant digestion is a sub-optimal way to experience it.
Sure. But actually seeing a work of art in person requires that you can afford to travel there, and that you can actually watch the work in peace. I am not sure what the best way to view a work like the Mona Lisa (to name an extreme example) is, but being jostled along in a crowd of Chinese surely isn't it.
If anyone's interested in this dilemma I recommend Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction from 1936.
One of the critical arguments that many are making here was access. Copies allow many people to access art opposed to the privileged. Benjamin also makes a huge case about the value of the original.
To go even deeper, I also studied video game history and preservation, and what happens when the "original" is electronic? Many people today are making electronic art whether books, photos, illustrations, music, films, video games, but we may also be losing much because there isn't much being done for preservation. Like how we lost hundreds of films because Hollywood studios did not care about preservation until too late, it's even worse for video games. On the plus side, it means anyone who cares enough will be able to preserve and write history how they want.
>is something that should be experienced in person.
I think thats true to a point. But when I first got a digital SLR, I went to MOMA and took pictures of a lot of art. I was able to go back and look through them. I actually really enjoy looking back through art. I often take pictures of the descriptive label at art museums and historic places.
Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but in the crowded place of the museum with everyone about, I enjoy the art, but I sometimes have a hard time processing everything. I enjoy a little downtime in the evening with my computer reading and re-experiencing.
I do enjoy interactive installation art, and that doesn't lend itself to photos.
The most amazing piece of art I've seen in person is "Christ of St. John of the Cross" by Dali at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow. It's an amazing painting. And the museum is free.
Unfortunately, getting to Glasgow is not free for me, and I probably will never do so again in my life. Sure, great art is better in person. There's more great art than I have money to get to, though, so (at least for us non-filthy-rich types), digital copies are far better than nothing.
I agree, no amount of flat mega-pixels is going to map a real feeling of the physical art. But the art also gets popular and that means queues, selfies, noise, pushy crowd, security, glass.
I dream one day there will be decent technology to experience the art remotely and alone with all senses, kind of VR where you will be able to see all dimensions, brush shades, surface roughness, reflections, touch and feel the material, in the surrounding and companion of your choice.
Personally, I'd rather voraciously consume as much art as humanly possible. This is a privilege only granted to the last few generations; why waste it?
I also recommend Van Gogh: Painted with Words, a BBC biopic starring Benedict Cumberbatch who acts and narrates Van Gogh's letters.
If you like Doctor Who, there's an episode on Van Gogh with Bill Nighy that's sweet and sci-fi silly but they have an incredible scene where they animate one of Van Gogh's paintings. Sort of like the 360 degree VR animation of Starry Sky that is floating around Facebook.
Slightly off-topic, but does anyone here have experience buying reproduction prints of public domain works online? I've been meaning to get a print of a Pieter Claesz piece, but with so many different websites and options I've succumb to analysis paralysis. Any tips?
Only done it once, but I downloaded a HQ version of the picture I wanted and had it printed at a local printer. Was super high quality paper and good ink. Cost me about £7/$10 for a decent size, and I grabbed a frame off Amazon.
There is nothing like the real thing. I tried a high-quality print of a work where the foreground was cutouts glued to the background, thinking that the lack of detail would the difference unnoticeable, but it still lacked everything that made the original special. That's the problem with prints of artwork: The first 99% is a nice picture, it's the last 1% that is the genius. Lots of people can play the notes John Coltrane played, but they are missing that 1% (a different take, I suppose, on 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration).
You can find places that make sell actual oil paintings that reproduce originals - i.e., they hire an artist to reproduce the original. It's not a scam; I don't think they put the original signature on. I haven't tried one and, as you might surmise, I'm not optimistic. Maybe I'll try something technically simple, such as a Miro. It's the only way I'll ever get to see a Miro in my living room.
Some of his more famous paintings like Starry Night and Wheatfield with Cypresses aren't here. I guess I'll have to settle for Wheatfield with Crows! The sketches are fantastic tho - you have to scroll quite a ways to get to them but they are worth it.
It is 30,000 × 23,756 pixels (file size: 205.1 MB) .
While incomparable to seeing it up close, a lot of brush details can be seen up close. If there was such as thing as a favorite jpg, for me this is it! :-)
What I like about his artworks is the rough texture of his oil painting. I mean, these paintings are not just 2D pictures and their 3D aspects (e.g. texture and depth of the paint) tell much more. I hope digitization technology would be improved.
The long, aligned strokes give the painting a feeling of motion and gravity, like bits of ferrous metal revealing a magnetic field. And the fact he put green in his beard -- and pulled it off flawlessly -- never ceases to amaze me. It's almost psychedelic.
Do all these seem low contrast? I find it hard to believe that he painted down in value like this constantly. He'd have to mix every color with grey. It seems much more likely to be a weird photography setup.
Google's collection is large but nowhere near exhaustive. I think some paintings are over 100,000 pixels across. In my opinion virtual reality doesn't add much. It's blurry. If you have a good monitor the website is better
There have been several small attempts but no coherent joined up effort.
I really hope some galleries are digitising their collections via 3D scanning. Viewing something like a Van Gogh in VR without some real texture and depth is not convincing. Some of that paint is 5mm off the canvas. You can see that from a fair distance.
[+] [-] AceJohnny2|7 years ago|reply
To put things into context: my mom is an art historian, and when I was a kid she'd regularly drag me to museums. I remember being bored out of my mind, with only the cool architecture of the museums themselves to mildly entertain me.
To this day I'm pretty uninterested in the classics
Years later, in my late 20s, I went to the National Gallery in London, and saw one of Van Gogh's "Wheatfield with Cypresses" [1] there, and for the first time a classical painting struck me as beautiful. Maybe it's the pastels, maybe it was the texture of the gouache (which no digital picture reproduces, you'd need a detailed 3D model), I just stood there entranced by this painting.
I bought a (stupidly overpriced) print of it at the gift shop, and to this day it's still the only classical painting I can recognize a love for.
Sadly, that particular painting isn't part of this digitized collection, since the collection is from the Amsterdam Museum, not from London's National Gallery.
[1] https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/vincent-van-gog...
[+] [-] stephenhuey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robin_reala|7 years ago|reply
It’s important for me as I need PD (or CC0, which is functionally equivalent) to pick decent cover art for Standard Ebooks[4] works. As it is we usually spend hours hunting through pre-1923 art books on Hathi for the perfect piece, and CC0 collections make that much much easier.
[1] https://metmuseum.org/art/collection/
[2] https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio
[3] http://munch.emuseum.com/
[4] https://standardebooks.org/
[+] [-] Confiks|7 years ago|reply
What do you mean with the ability of the museums to choose a license for the paintings, and what is the "sub-A4" license you refer to?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel....
[+] [-] jay-anderson|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdsa5325|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andybak|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cocacola1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tenaciousDaniel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rococode|7 years ago|reply
The one our group made used this exact dataset (the museum website)! We called it VANGOGHORNO haha. We basically pulled the images from the collection and mixed them with non-Van Gogh paintings. It was surprisingly a very learnable dataset, the top two teams got around 97% accuracy and many teams got to 90%. We resized the images and included paintings from vaguely similar styles like impressionism so we were surprised people did that well. I think the top team used some kind of transfer learning to identify entities in the paintings and learned from that.
[+] [-] Someone|7 years ago|reply
It also is a dataset where cheating is quite easy. A google search may quickly turn up items you left out of the training set.
Do you know whether any teams did this (could even have happened by accident, if people googled to find different views of paintings, and accidentally included pictures not in the training set)?
[+] [-] ArcticCelt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdsa5325|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaspervdj|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryaneager|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zokier|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] archagon|7 years ago|reply
Anyway, I'm looking forward to throwing this batch in there. Hope somebody sticks them all in a torrent soon.
[+] [-] protonimitate|7 years ago|reply
But, (I can't help myself), I am conflicted about the digitization of museums/artists/artworks. Seeing a work of art, let alone one of the greats, is something that should be experienced in person. Reducing it to pixels for instant digestion is a sub-optimal way to experience it.
Granted, this is amazing to research and exposure, and for distribution to those who wouldn't normally be able to see it - but I fear that it takes something away from the art.
If you are involved in the contemporary art scene at all, you may have noticed that works are beginning to become 'instagram' friendly - from paintings that look good on the internet but are ultimately shallow, 'installations' that generate a lot of hype and look good on your Story (a la Infinity Mirrors [0]), to hordes of people taking selfies with the Mona Lisa instead of appreciating it [1].
Maybe that's just the way things will progress in the Art world. But, imo, it is more important than ever to appreciate and continue creating the physical, tangible, beauty of art in an ever increasing digital world.
[0]http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-kusama-mi...
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/27/arts/design/mona-lisa-ins...
[+] [-] olavk|7 years ago|reply
In any case, for most ordinary people it is totally unrealistic to travel to museums all over the world to enjoy the real paintings.
[+] [-] wjn0|7 years ago|reply
For people who don't live close to huge cities with big museums, the diversity and availability of art could be very low. Digitizing art and making it publicly available is a step forward for those people.
[+] [-] tjwds|7 years ago|reply
Yes, digitization is inherently a transformation and remediation of the work. This means that yes, something is taken away. But the value add, in my opinion, is so great that it's very well worth the money and time that goes into it.
My favorite work of art ever is Friedrich's The Monk by the Sea [0]: it fills me with emotion every time I see its digital facsimile. I hope one day that I'll be able to see it in person, but for now, it's accessible to me and billions of others to appreciate and enjoy.
> works are beginning to become 'instagram' friendly
Respectfully, I highly disagree with this sentiment. In my personal experience, I'm seeing just as many artists pushing back on reproducibility and the "prettiness" of art as there are folks trying to create works that look good on office walls or on Instagram stories.
> to hordes of people taking selfies with the Mona Lisa instead of appreciating it
Finally, again, I respectfully disagree. Who's to say that I can't enjoy art and take a selfie with it too? Many people like to add some sort of lens, most frequently their phone camera, to their experiences at concerts, museums, and galleries. I don't think anyone's qualified to tell those folks that they're doing it wrong.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monk_by_the_Sea
[+] [-] pducks32|7 years ago|reply
Nevertheless, I still see such an amazing hope in having these works digitized at least to give people some perspective at the range of many great artists and to allow the art to inhabit a person's life in the way they want which is what the artist would want. And hopefully if they love it enough and it impacts them then they can go see it in person.
[+] [-] codingdave|7 years ago|reply
As far as the contemporary scene, it will change and evolve, as it always does. It you don't like the current trends, start something new. After all, the last hundred years have seen a decent collection of deliberate art movements where a group of people consciously came together to make statements with their arts and acts. There is no reason to let digital trends stop that.
[+] [-] Freak_NL|7 years ago|reply
Sure. But actually seeing a work of art in person requires that you can afford to travel there, and that you can actually watch the work in peace. I am not sure what the best way to view a work like the Mona Lisa (to name an extreme example) is, but being jostled along in a crowd of Chinese surely isn't it.
[+] [-] Regardsyjc|7 years ago|reply
One of the critical arguments that many are making here was access. Copies allow many people to access art opposed to the privileged. Benjamin also makes a huge case about the value of the original.
To go even deeper, I also studied video game history and preservation, and what happens when the "original" is electronic? Many people today are making electronic art whether books, photos, illustrations, music, films, video games, but we may also be losing much because there isn't much being done for preservation. Like how we lost hundreds of films because Hollywood studios did not care about preservation until too late, it's even worse for video games. On the plus side, it means anyone who cares enough will be able to preserve and write history how they want.
[+] [-] acomjean|7 years ago|reply
I think thats true to a point. But when I first got a digital SLR, I went to MOMA and took pictures of a lot of art. I was able to go back and look through them. I actually really enjoy looking back through art. I often take pictures of the descriptive label at art museums and historic places.
Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but in the crowded place of the museum with everyone about, I enjoy the art, but I sometimes have a hard time processing everything. I enjoy a little downtime in the evening with my computer reading and re-experiencing.
I do enjoy interactive installation art, and that doesn't lend itself to photos.
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|7 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, getting to Glasgow is not free for me, and I probably will never do so again in my life. Sure, great art is better in person. There's more great art than I have money to get to, though, so (at least for us non-filthy-rich types), digital copies are far better than nothing.
[+] [-] imhoguy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] archagon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dowwie|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Regardsyjc|7 years ago|reply
If you like Doctor Who, there's an episode on Van Gogh with Bill Nighy that's sweet and sci-fi silly but they have an incredible scene where they animate one of Van Gogh's paintings. Sort of like the 360 degree VR animation of Starry Sky that is floating around Facebook.
[+] [-] ericdykstra|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamben|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forapurpose|7 years ago|reply
You can find places that make sell actual oil paintings that reproduce originals - i.e., they hire an artist to reproduce the original. It's not a scam; I don't think they put the original signature on. I haven't tried one and, as you might surmise, I'm not optimistic. Maybe I'll try something technically simple, such as a Miro. It's the only way I'll ever get to see a Miro in my living room.
[+] [-] ghaff|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epberry|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a_d|7 years ago|reply
It is 30,000 × 23,756 pixels (file size: 205.1 MB) .
While incomparable to seeing it up close, a lot of brush details can be seen up close. If there was such as thing as a favorite jpg, for me this is it! :-)
[+] [-] kbumsik|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nemo1618|7 years ago|reply
The long, aligned strokes give the painting a feeling of motion and gravity, like bits of ferrous metal revealing a magnetic field. And the fact he put green in his beard -- and pulled it off flawlessly -- never ceases to amaze me. It's almost psychedelic.
[+] [-] Jamerson|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bookofjoe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verhovsky|7 years ago|reply
https://artsandculture.google.com/theme/igKSKBBnEBSGKg
https://artsandculture.google.com/search/streetview?project=...
https://artsandculture.google.com/partner/van-gogh-museum
https://artsandculture.google.com/partner/palace-of-versaill... look at the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall_of_Mirrors
There's a Daydream app for looking at paintings scanned by Google https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.vr..... You'll need the $100 headset and a Pixel or some other compatible phone.
Google's collection is large but nowhere near exhaustive. I think some paintings are over 100,000 pixels across. In my opinion virtual reality doesn't add much. It's blurry. If you have a good monitor the website is better
https://artsandculture.google.com/favorite/group/fAKyrWQ7SlX...
Wikimedia Commons has hundreds of scans for some artists
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Paintings_by_art...
[+] [-] andybak|7 years ago|reply
I really hope some galleries are digitising their collections via 3D scanning. Viewing something like a Van Gogh in VR without some real texture and depth is not convincing. Some of that paint is 5mm off the canvas. You can see that from a fair distance.
[+] [-] renierbotha|7 years ago|reply
https://github.com/Rendiere/vanScrape
[+] [-] candiodari|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] majortennis|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garfij|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zerostar07|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sctb|7 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html