Self portrait, 1659
Self Portrait, 1659 by Rembrandt van Rijn
This one is not a question of beauty, emotion, skill, or anything so broad or ill-defined. It’s about paint. Rembrandt paintings, both what they were when he made them and what the are now as historical objects, are defined in great part by the handling and makeup of their paint. The pigments, media, and methods Rembrandt used are among the most studied and closely-photographed of any painter in history. Yet they cannot be fully reproduced. It is as if all the data we have collected on Rembrandt has just pushed the prospect of making new Rembrandts further from our grasp. We simply learn how much Rembrandt-ness we have to yet capture.
To appreciate the depth of information, lost or retrievable, embodied in old paintings, I recommend What Painting Is by James Elkins, in which he writes:
“You might think with something as well known as oil painting, the techniques would all be written down, so that anyone could study them and paint like Titian or Rembrandt. But oil painting methods have always beem semi-secret, like alchemical recipies.”
He then shares a 19th century list of 11 steps to approximate the look of an El Greco painting. Compiled by German scholars with access to materials and documentation no longer available, at best, a highly-trained painter could follow them to reproduce some parts of some paintings. An earlier section examines in near-microscopic detail the composition of a small corner of a Monet painting, reproduced in a full-page color plate in the book. When teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Elkins offered a course in copying paintings from the school’s museum. His first student to attempt to copy Monet took two months to make any progress, a crucial portion of the time being dedicated to letting certain layers of paint dry before working more.
When advertising agency Wunderman Thompson created a “new Rembrandt, it took them 18 months. Granted, this was in 2016, eons ago in the world of AI. Their technique of printing multiple layers of ink based on a height map generated from scans of actual Rembrandts could certainly be accelerated now and done with more sophistication. But Rembrandts are made of paint, not ink and binder, and they both do and do not have discreet layers. When they do, it is the interaction of layered paint – and now time – that make the layers matter. Six hundred years of material science has not come up with a material that is better at being oil paint than oil paint, and all the while we have been ingesting the behaviors of oil paint into our cultural subconscious as signifiers of art and representation. Why, then, spend so much time and effort to get a machine to create a painting on a schedule that would have let them just hire a human painter?
Creative Partner at Wunderman Thompson, Bas Korsten says:
The reactions were sometimes heated, and certainly not all positive. Especially not from the art world. However, that bit of controversy helped us getting people to write, tweet and talk about it….
We were very successful in creating a big bang in the press, and on social, for both ING and tech partner Microsoft. With 1.8 billion media impressions and around 2,000 newspaper/magazine articles, including a handful of front pages. An earned media value of €12.5 million”
Korsten concludes
We’re not 3D experts, Artificial Intelligence (AI) adepts or Rembrandt lovers per se. We’re just people who like to help clients solve business issues.