Franz Smola, a curator at Belvedere Museum, and Emil Wallner, a resident at the Google Arts & Culture Lab, sought archival sources and scholarly research, before reaching for the most contemporary of art restoration tools: artificial intelligence (AI).Īs Dr. To reimagine the color that Klimt might have deployed on his Faculty paintings, Dr. The AI-colorized versions of Klimt’s Faculty Paintings, (from left) “Jurisprudence,” “Philosophy,” and “Medicine.” Images: Belvedere Museum / Google Arts & Culture Klimt – The Man of Contradictions, an expansive virtual hub that chronicles Klimt’s art and lifetime, and presents a digital reconstruction of his Faculty works - in full and glorious color. But no more: on October 7, Google Arts & Culture unveiled Klimt vs.

Roundly dismissed as “perverted excess,” the canvases were shelved and later, in the chaos of World War II, lost to a fire.įor decades, Klimt’s so-called Faculty Paintings, “Philosophy,” “Jurisprudence,” and “Medicine,” have only survived in grainy black-and-white photographs, devoid of the sumptuous, aurous pigment on which the painter’s name was made. The three works that Gustav Klimt turned in were heavily stylized, intensely allegorical, and openly erotic - artistic hallmarks of the Vienna Secession movement and a drastic departure from the Renaissance stylings preferred by the committee.

In 1894, when the art committee of Austria’s Ministry of Education commissioned an up-and-coming local artist to submit paintings to adorn the ceiling of the University of Vienna, they got more than they bargained for.

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