The “art” of reproduction

For those of you who use web searches extensively for your lectures or presentations, check out the post “The Art Of Reproduction” on the blog Visual Hint — the color of data:

“Type “Danae Klimt” into your favorite search engine, and you conjure up a high-resolution image of Gustav Klimt’s Danaë: tan limbs, a shower of gold, red hair.”

“Or did you find pink limbs? Or were they gray or even green? There’s the rub: the seemingly perfect museum holds dozens of Danaës—with dozens of different palettes. Even the shape changes as reproductions are subtly cropped.”

“Curious just how far reproductions stray from each other, we began an investigation. (Go directly to the results if you like.) For a set of famous artworks, we downloaded all the plausible copies we could find. Then we wrote software to reconstruct each artwork as a mosaic, a patchwork quilt where each patch comes from an individual copy.”

hat tip: Nancy Alexander

Delacroix painting vandalized

Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) has been defaced by a 28-year-old woman who wrote “AE911″ across a roughly foot-long section along the bottom. The painting has been in the Louvre-Lens since the satellite museum opened December. The tag refers to the 9/11 conspiracy website Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

via Reuters

Santa Croce main chapel restoration digitally documented

The Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence announced the reopening of its main chapel with the completion of its extensive restoration. If you find yourself in Florence within the next year, the scaffolding used for the restoration remains and visitors can have a rare opportunity to see upper registers up close. However, even those of us who won’t be traveling to Italy soon can still view the before/during/after process of the restoration on the basilica’s website, along with previous projects. The software used to digitally document the work, Modus Operandi, allows users to zoom in on details of Angolo Gaddi’s brushwork from the 1380s as well as the restoration.

via artdaily.org

Update: BBC’s Your Paintings completes access to UK’s public-owned paintings; taggers now welcome

Eighteen months ago we announced the launch of Your Paintings, a BBC-hosted site “which aims to show the entire UK national collection of oil paintings, the stories behind the paintings, and where to see them for real.” The site, co-funded by The Public Catalogue Foundation, announced it has completed its task. This translates into 3,217 participating venues and 211,861 paintings that are available online.

Now, the BBC and PCF are asking the public to help them tag the paintings.

Rembrandt Database offers a rich research resource

The Rembrandt Database is dedicated to gathering and presenting past and current scholarship (with their sources) about the 17th-century Netherlandish artist. Still in beta, the goal of the site is to foster “a platform for the presentation of new interpretations” through a collaborative effort between numerous museums, research institutions and individual scholars worldwide. Currently there are twelve paintings available, but the accompanying documentation for them exceeds over 1,000 records with a strong emphasis in technical analysis and conservation history. Visit often, as the site plans to expand both the number of paintings and participating institutions.

Prado’s entire Goya collection now available online

The Museo Nacional del Prado has launched a new website dedicated to beautiful digital images of their entire collection of works and documents by and about Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes. Goya en el Prado (available only in Spanish) is divided by medium, then subject, and entries for a few paintings offer supplemental technical examination images. The site also includes biographical and bibliographical information, including a digital library of 35 full-text copies of reference material.

via artdaily

UPDATE: Wrong restoration now right?

What began as a lament for what was has become a celebration of what is: the amateur restoration of Elias Garcia Martinez’ “Ecce Homo” by a elderly woman now has fans all over the world. Just check out the Beast-Jesus Restoration Society Facebook page (with a petition link to save the restoration from being restored).

Amateur restoration gone wrong

An elderly parishioner from the Sanctuary of Mercy Church, Borja, Spain, took it upon herself to “restore” one of the church’s beloved 19th-century frescoes -– Ecce Homo by Elias Garcia Martinez. The unhappy results can be seen in the before-and-after images, and in the aftermath of the incident the work now has a new nickname: “Ecce Mono,” or Behold the Monkey.

via LA Times

An Odalisque with a past

They almost got away with it.  Matisse’s Odalisque in Red Pants was discovered stolen from the Sofia Imber Contemporary Art Museum in Caracas, Venezuela  in 2002, but in fact it had been stolen at least two years earlier.  The thieves had replaced the painting with a copy and no one had noticed, even though the fake was denounced as inferior when it was detected.

Last week the painting was recovered when two people in Miami tried to sell it to an undercover FBI agent.    Among other factors blamed for this theft (and others that have been reported at the museum)  museum officials point to the sharp decrease in arts funding under Hugo Chávez.

That’s the real Odalisque on the left, below, and the fake on the right; or wait, is it….

via the NY Times

Fisk University and the Stieglitz Collection: The final ruling

We’ve had a couple of updates in the last six months, but this week the final decision was announced: The Tennessee Supreme Court denied the application of the Tennessee Attorney General to hear an appeal of the decision of the Court of Appeals to permit Fisk’s Alfred C. Stieglitz Art Collection to be shared with the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art located in Arkansas. This means the university can move ahead with working out the logistics of the deal, which includes the museum paying $30 million for a half interest of the Collection.

For previous posts, click here.