You see above a painting by Amedeo Modigliani, a portrait of the artist’s lover Beatrice Hastings, unseen by the public until its rediscovery just this year. Or at any rate, some see that: in another sense, the image is a new or almost-new artistic creation, based on X-rays of Modigliani’s Portrait of a Girl. Underneath the paint that makes up that celebrated work lie traces enough to establish the presence of a different, earlier one beneath. But only now, after the employment of neural networks fed with enough of the artist’s acknowledged work to recognize and replicate his signature style, do we have a sense of what it could have looked like.

“Anthony Bourached and George Cann, both PhD candidates, are heading the ‘NeoMasters’ project through a company called Oxia Palus,” writes The Guardian‘s Dalya Alberge. “They have ambitious plans to rediscover further hidden paintings on canvases that were reused by artists, who were perhaps too impoverished to buy supplies or dissatisfied with initial compositions.”

Modigliani was certainly impecunious enough to have done so more than once, and his relationship with Hastings — a long affair that was volatile even by the standards of the early 20th-century Parisian bohemia they inhabited — did provide material for other portraits.

Specialists, respectively, in neuroscience and the surface of Mars (their company’s name refers to a region of that planet), Bourached and Cann have proven enterprising in this art-oriented endeavor. “A 3D-printed physical rendering of their creation, complete with computer-simulated ‘brushstrokes’ and texture, will soon go on display at London’s Lebenson Gallery as part of the duo’s ‘NeoMasters’ project,” writes Nora McGreevy at Smithsonian.com. Earlier this year, McGreevy also covered Oxia Palus’ digitally assisted recovery of a Barcelona landscape possibly painted by the Spanish poet, playwright, and artist Santiago Rusiñol — before it was painted over by Pablo Picasso.

This discovery actually goes back to 1992, when conservators first determined the existence of another image beneath Picasso’s little-known La Miséreuse accroupie, or The Crouching Beggar. “Researchers suspect that Picasso used the mountains in Rusiñol’s landscape to shape the contours of his female subject’s back,” writes McGreevy. “A 2018 X-ray of that lesser-known work by the Art Gallery of Toronto provided Oxia Palus what they needed to start work on their A.I.-assisted recreation. Not only did Bourached and Cann 3D print 100 physical copies of the final product, they linked each one to a unique non-fungible token (NFT), the new kind of digital artifact that has become something of a craze in the art world — surely an unimaginable afterlife for these images Modigliani and Picasso must have assumed they’d obliterated for good.

via Hyperallergic

Related Content:

Original Portrait of the Mona Lisa Found Beneath the Paint Layers of da Vinci’s Masterpiece

Scientists Create a New Rembrandt Painting, Using a 3D Printer & Data Analysis of Rembrandt’s Body of Work

Short Film Takes You Inside the Recovery of Andy Warhol’s Lost Computer Art

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams once wrote of his early experiences introducing the World Wide Web to others. “In 1993, there were only a handful of Web sites you could access, such as the Smithsonian’s exhibit of gems. Those pages were slow to load and crashed as often as they worked.” But those who witnessed this technology in action would invariably “get out of their chairs their eyes like saucers, and they would approach the keyboard. They had to touch it themselves. There was something about the internet that was like catnip.” In the intervening decades, the technology powering the internet has only improved, and we’ve all felt how greatly that catnip-like effect has intensified. And the Smithsonian, as we’ve featured here on Open Culture, is still there — now with much more online than gems.

Today, the Smithsonian’s impressive online collections are accessible through Artvee, a new search engine for downloadable high-resolution, public domain artworks. So are the collections of more than 40 other international institutions, from the New York Public Library and the Art Institute of Chicago to the Rijksmuseum and Paris Musées, many of which had little or no online presence back in the early 1990s.

In recent years, they’ve gotten quite serious indeed about digitizing their holdings and making those digitizations freely available to the world, uploading them by the thousand, even by the million. With so many artworks and artifacts already up, and surely much more to come, the question becomes how best to navigate not just one of these collections, but all of them.

Artvee constitutes one answer to this question. Using its search engine, writes Denise Tempone at Domestika, “you can filter categories such as abstract art, landscape, mythology, drawings, illustrations, botany, fashion, figurative art, religion, animal, desserts, history, Japanese art, and still life. The site also gives you the option to search by artist. You will find works by Rembrandt van Rijn, Claude Monet, Raphael, and Sandro Botticelli in this amazing gallery.” Other collections, created by Artvee itself as well as by its users, include “illustrations from fairy tales; covers of popular American songs; and some even more peculiar ones, such as adverts selling bicycles that are over a hundred years old.”

The variety of artists browsable on Artvee also includes Alphonse Mucha, Edvard Munch, and Hilma af Kint; other collections offer the wonders of political illustrations, book promo posters, and NASA’s visions of the future. All of the items within, it bears repeating, are in the public domain or distributed under a Creative Commons license, meaning you can use them not just as sources of inspiration but as ingredients in your own work as well, a possibility few us could have imagined at the dawn of the Web. Back then, you’ll recall, we all used a variety of different tools and portals to navigate the internet, according to personal preference. The emerging field of art search engines, which includes not just Artvee but other options like Museo, may remind us of those days — and how far the internet has come since.

Related Content:

A Search Engine for Finding Free, Public Domain Images from World-Class Museums

Visit 2+ Million Free Works of Art from 20 World-Class Museums Free Online

The Smithsonian Puts 2.8 Million High-Res Images Online and Into the Public Domain

14 Paris Museums Put 300,000 Works of Art Online: Download Classics by Monet, Cézanne & More

Creative Commons Officially Launches a Search Engine That Indexes 300+ Million Public Domain Images

Flim: a New AI-Powered Movie-Screenshot Search Engine

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.