Rembrandt Redux
“Rembrandt goes so deep into the mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language. It is with justice that they call Rembrandt — magician — that’s no easy occupation.”
— Vincent Van Gogh
On April 5, 2016, Microsoft, Delft University, and J. Walter Thompson Amsterdam unveiled the newest “Rembrandt” portrait created by machine learning algorithms — artificial intelligence. Over the prior 18 months, “The Next Rembrandt” team used artificial intelligence to study 346 portraits analyzing each subject by age, gender, and head position. They studied facial features measuring the proportions between eyes, nose, and mouth. Team Rembrandt, as they called themselves, converted 346 Rembrandt paintings into 150 gigabytes of digital graphics. It then took 500 hours to print out the 148 million pixels into 13 layers of paint-based UV ink.
Team Rembrandt did its homework. Technically, they made an original, passable Rembrandt. Ernst van de Wetering is a Rembrandt expert skilled at distinguishing authentic Rembrandt from works by Rembrandt students and followers, and from faux Rembrandts. Van de Wetering noted a clash of brushstroke style: the machine that painted Rembrandt mixed the delicate detail from his younger days with the broader, more ragged brush strokes he adopted toward the end of his life.
While technically in the ballpark, did Team Rembrandt satisfy artistically? Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for The New Yorker, took only brief note of the computer made portrait:
The sitter has a sparkle of personality but utterly lacks the personhood — the being-ness — that never eluded Rembrandt. He is an actor, acting. …it mimics the effect of a particular creator’s art. Working backward from that point, it passes the creator’s intention — intelligence, emotion, soul — coming the other way. There’s no harm in it. But all that work, for this?
18 months, 500 hours, 148 million pixels and 186,000 data points. “All that work, for this?”
The computer painting process is backward: rather than begin with an inspiration from life that engages human personality and struggles — the computer follows the contours of an existing painting to simulate something that passes for inspiration. It replicates the surface technique in the hope of finding deeper “intelligence, emotion and soul” upon completion. The self-learning algorithm and its creators have deceived themselves into thinking that human intelligence, passion, and soul are in the brushstrokes, the paint color or the distance between the subject’s nose and mouth. The soul and passion begin in Rembrandt, flow through his talent and skill, and are then received by the viewer.
British art critic Jonathan Jones wrote in The Guardian that to begin to understand Rembrandt one must:
…experience plague, poverty, old age, and all the other human experiences that make Rembrandt who he was, and his art what it is. It’s not style and surface effects that make his paintings so great but the artist’s capacity to reveal his inner life and make us aware in turn of our own interiority — to experience an uncanny contact, soul to soul.
To Jones, the machine-made Rembrandt makes a mockery of human art:
What a horrible, tasteless, insensitive, and soulless travesty of all that is creative in human nature. What a vile product of our strange time when the best brains dedicate themselves to the stupidest ‘challenges,’ when technology is used for things it should never be used for and everybody feels obliged to applaud the heartless results because we so revere everything digital.
Jones derides the Next Rembrandt as an absurd misuse of technology. Why did Microsoft combine efforts with J. Walter Thompson Amsterdam ad agency and ING insurance?
It was a publicity stunt for Microsoft, proof that Microsoft code can attempt the impossible. But, for all three companies, it was just good business, a chance to make money. J. Walter Thompson Amsterdam brags on its web site that in the days following the unveiling, Google searches for ING increased by 61% and for Microsoft by 20%. Thompson continues, “on launch day, ING and partner Microsoft stock values increased by 1.22% and .49%” respectively.
Over 350 years, millions of people have been moved by Rembrandt’s work and his life. Nothing was moved by the artificial Rembrandt but the stock market. Rembrandt redux is merely a commodity to boost corporate stock.
Schjeldahl’s question still haunts: “All that for this?”
***
Nong Nooch Tropical Garden, south of Pattaya, Thailand, welcomes a steady stream of buses unloading tourists from all over the world. The tourists come to ride elephants, stroll the gardens and catch the daily elephant shows. In the half-hour show, trained elephants pedal three wheeled bicycles, kick soccer balls, throw darts, play basketball, and dance with hula hoops. Midway through the show, three elephants take paint brushes in trunk and paint on three easels. Attendants assist the elephants by loading the brushes with paint and switching colors. The first strokes outline a brown trapezoid. Then a single green stroke moves upward. Then the elephant splotches red, then yellow. It’s a flowering plant in a pot.
The artistic elephants are led out of the ring while the crowd cheers for artwork on par with a child’s rendering of flowers. You know it’s art because you can buy an original elephant painting. The elephant attendants aggressively hawk the work to the audience, 250 Baht for a painting, 350 Baht for a painting on a T-shirt. By today’s conversion rate, (November 25, 2019) each painting on canvas sells for $8.27 and the T-shirt for $11.57.
An elephant painting is a souvenir, a curio, created mechanically by a trained elephant. Neither the elephants nor the algorithms loll around a woodland pond absorbing the beauty of the water lilies. They don’t intensely observe the world or seek inspiration about existence.
Would you spend $8 on flowerpot painting by an elephant? Or, do you prefer $432,500 for a portrait created by artificial intelligence?
In October 2018, an anonymous bidder paid $432,500 for a portrait entitled “Edmond de Belamy from La Familie de Belamy” created by the French art collective, Obvious. The auction house, Christie’s, called it the first portrait generated by algorithm to be sold at auction. They expected the portrait to sell for $7,000-$10,000.
The elephant and algorithmic artists are both trained to produce a piece of art. Elephants must master a few brush strokes and the dabbing of a dozen flowers. (The elephants seem to enjoy jabbing the brush at the canvas for the flower petals.
Algorithms study millions of brush strokes and then follow the protocols they learn to apply paint through a 3-D printer. The machine creates the painting following a logic of fabrication — like assembling an Ikea bookcase. We can easily understand the machine’s process, like we understand how to build a shed.
Van Gogh called Rembrandt’s work “magical” and “mysterious” not for his technique (which can be mimicked and analyzed) but for his insight into what we don’t understand — life itself.
Rembrandt chose what to paint just as we choose what we see. Where we look, how we see, and what we see positions us within an environment. The active choice of seeing, then, establishes your relationship with the world. Rembrandt teaches us how to see through his eyes.
It is a moment of communion with Rembrandt, a moment of life shared across the centuries, a moment for which there are no words.
Dan Hunter is an award-winning playwright, songwriter, teacher and founding partner of Hunter Higgs, LLC, an advocacy and communications firm. H-IQ, the Hunter Imagination Questionnaire, invented by Dan Hunter and developed by Hunter Higgs, LLC, received global recognition for innovation by Reimagine Education, the world’s largest awards program for innovative pedagogies. Out of a field of 1200 applicants from all over the world, H-IQ was one of 12 finalists in December 2022. H-IQ is being used in pilot programs in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, North Carolina and New York. He is co-author, with Dr. Rex Jung and Ranee Flores, of A New Measure of Imagination Ability: Anatomical Brain Imaging Correlates, published March 22, 2016 in The Frontiers of Psychology, an international peer-reviewed journal. He’s served as managing director of the Boston Playwrights Theatre at Boston University, published numerous plays with Baker’s Plays, and has performed his one-man show ABC, NPR, BBC and CNN. Formerly executive director of the Massachusetts Advocates for the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (MAASH) a statewide advocacy and education group, Hunter has 25 years’ experience in politics and arts advocacy. He served as Director of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs (a cabinet appointment requiring Senate confirmation). His most recent book, Atrophy, Apathy & Ambition,offers a layman’s investigation into artificial intelligence.