Software To Authenticate Paintings

eldavojohn writes, "There's a new software tool out and about called Authentic which analyzes paintings to determine if they are indeed authentic works of the artist. If you don't think this is a serious problem to tackle, some experts estimate up to 15 percent of 'original prints' sold at auction houses are actually fake. From the article: 'By dividing 145 digitized paintings into pixels and analyzing the colors of each and how they compared with nearby pixels, the system was able to spot patterns unique to the painter. The software also showed Van Gogh's use of complementary colors (PDF) increased during his most active period from 1885 to 1890, according to the study published in Pattern Recognition Letters... In tests, Authentic performed as well as 15 human volunteers who were each given a small segment of a painting to study.' I've heard of many tools that analyze texts to verify the author but this is an extra dimension and a new frontier for pattern recognition. Tacking on another dimension, how much longer until we are able to analyze video in the same way?"

Comments

Re:Think of the Alternative

[sakusha]

There are two conventional approaches to authentication: provenance and catalog raisonne.

The provenance of a work is a detailed history of every owner to possess the work since its creation. If you can establish an unbroken, verified provenance, the work is presumed to be authentic. The only problem with this scheme is that a provenance may also be forged or broken. For example, some recent works that were stolen by the Nazis during WWII have forged provenances that reassigned the works through sham owners. It is sometimes possible to reconstruct the history of a work, and indeed, recently the provenance of a work by Gustav Klimt was reconstructed, proving it was stolen and not sold to a gallery, and the rightful owner regained ownership of the painting, and it sold at auction for the highest price ever paid for a painting: $135 Million.

A catalog raisonne is a complete catalog of every known work by an artist, preferably compiled within the artist's lifetime, with his cooperation. If an artist says he created the work, who is anyone to dispute it? Of course, many catalogs raisonne are compiled after the death of the artist, and rely on expert's opinions and provenances. Some of these decisions are quite controversial, for example, the Rembrandt Research Committee has recently removed several works from the catalog, deauthenticating them based on new technologies and scholarship, or on new research that broke the provenance. This is horrifying for an owner of a deauthenticated work, who can only sit and watch his multimillion dollar painting become worthless.

Anyway, in an ideal world, all works would have well established provenances and cataloguing. Indeed, I used to work for a major art institution which had the goal of establishing a provenance for EVERY known artwork in the world, putting it all into a computer catalog, to be housed in a nuclear-blastproof vault. But this is just a pipe dream of a few crazy art historians with more money than sense.

Re:Thank you, Captain Obvious

[ScentCone]

There is no longer any reason for works of "art" to be "lost to the ravages of time", by my definition. If it is "good", there will be many copies, because it has the essence of what makes it "good". Some copies are sure to survive.

Look, when a fine art printmaker personally draws an image on a stone or plate, and produces a texture that lays semi-reflective ink onto a particular texture of hand-made paper using a certain density of ink... and then hand-registers the print while pressing the paper against another half-dozen litho stones to produce a very specific finished result... that cannot be photographically reproduced. Or mechanically so. Or digitally so... not in any way that produces the same results to the eye. Especially when the artist wraps up the print run by hand-coloring with other media, or applying Chine-colle, etc., however many of that particular piece have been produced are as many as will ever be produced. And some of them will not be kept as well as others. Scarcity ensues, and value (if the work is worth anything to its audience/appreciators) does go up. Looking at a high-res scan of the thing is NOT the same.

Exactly the same thing applies to a limited run of castings from a sculpture. The process is destructive, the original may be lost... these are things that are not the same, when seen photographically. Do you really think that seeing a full-sized copy of "David" is the same as walking into the room that contains the original one that Michelangelo personally touched with his own hands? It's not.

Is a unique "artistic statement" lessened because it is not the original embodiment of the idea?

Maybe, maybe not. But the experience of actually seeing (or touching) the work may very well not be the same, and that's between the artist and his audience - not between scam artists and a scammed audience. Someone being told they're looking directly at the piece of work produced by the artist, and seeing something like a Giclee or other reproduction, will either know they're being lied to, or suddenly think a lot less of the artist.

Brush stroke analysis

[nickovs]

Colour analysis is interesting but it's well known that an artist's colour usage changes over time (a famous example being Claude Monet and his eye cataracts). Brush stroke patterns, on the other hand, seem to change less. There was an interesting paper in 2004 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on using wavelet analysis of brush stroke marks to separate originals from imitations and to detect areas of paintings that had been reworked.

Of course these are all just tools that add evidence either way, not proof of originality or forgery. I suspect that using both colour and brush stroke analysis would do a better job than just one or the other.