For a long time there was only a shadowy guess of what heated emotions in Vienna to such an extent that professors wrote a petition, the writer Karl Kraus was outraged, art critics etched and even the House of Representatives was concerned with the matter.

Because more than a few drafts and black-and-white photographs have remained of the paintings that Gustav Klimt created for the ceiling of the large ballroom of the University of Vienna and which caused a scandal when he presented them between 1900 and 1903.

The accusations were ugly, pornographic and perverse.

Ursula Scheer

Editor in the features section.

  • Follow I follow

Instead of peculiar historical allegories of "philosophy", "medicine" and "jurisprudence", Klimt created three intertwined symbolic images in which naked bodies and skeletons symbolize Eros and Thanatos, the love of wisdom appears like a ghost, the healing art is turned away from people and jurisprudence is threatening. The resistance was so fierce that Klimt returned the order, waived the fee and from then on only painted for private individuals. Two faculty paintings were bought by a Jewish collector couple who were expropriated during the Nazi era, and the third was bought by the Austrian Gallery. The four by three meter large paintings were hidden in a castle by the National Socialist rulers during World War II and burned there in the last days of the war,presumably set on fire by German troops in retreat.

In its Arts and Culture Lab, Google claims to have found out what the destroyed works might have looked like: with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). “The Klimt Color Enigma” is the name of the next prestige project from the cultural department of the network group, which has been collecting a gigantic treasure trove of data from high-resolution scanned works of art since 2011 and combining them into virtual exhibitions. Gustav Klimt is now receiving a virtual retrospective on the website and in the app. Franz Smola from the Belvedere in Vienna, an expert on Klimt, acted as curator, and more than thirty international institutions have entered the list of cooperation partners, from the Albertina to the Metropolitan Museum and the Kunsthaus Zug.

Putting together paintings in the data room that can never come together in reality, adding digitized drawings, photos and letters and thus making a “world artist worldwide” more accessible has a whole charm of its own, says Smola. And admits: Despite the augmented reality tour through virtual gallery rooms that the project offers, it is of course not a substitute for an exhibition, not even a book. It follows its own media rules: the modular organization allows users to drift from the image to the audio content to the explanatory text, from Klimt's golden phase to his early work and on to his studio. Everything in writing is kept brief. The little information should make you want to discover Klimt in all his contradictions: “Klimt versus Klimt” is the title of the 700-object arrangement.

The heart, however, is “The Klimt Color Enigma”: the miraculous color renewal of the faculty images. Google isn't the first company to try this. Three years ago, Factum Arte, a company based in Milan, Madrid and London that became famous with a facsimile of Tutankhamun's burial chamber, breathed new life into Klimt's “medicine” in terms of color. When printed in original size, a black and white photo of the work served as the basis, on which painters applied fresh paint, based on other paintings by Klimt and based on a detail of the painting from which a color reproduction has survived. The brushwork was digitally adapted to Klimt's and the result was printed out again, so that it was finally gilded. The very convincing result could be seen in a documentary on Sky Art.

Algorithmic exhibition

Unsurprisingly, Google works purely digitally and turns the Klimt reconstruction into an algorithmic exhibition.

“We don't paint new pictures, we color the photographs,” says Simon Rein from Google Arts and Culture.

Without the human factor, the equation does not work out here either.

It consists in Smola's research.

The curator meticulously gathered information on the colors of the pictures from the abundant historical descriptions and also took paintings by Klimt with similar motifs from the same creative phase into account when it comes to value.

This information refines a self-learning algorithm developed by Google engineers, which was trained with work by Klimt, millions of images of real objects and tens of thousands of images from the Google art database. The result: raw flesh-colored in the incarnate, the naked convict writhes in the face of the fatal embrace of a poison green octopus in the "Jurisprudence". Powdery pastel tones, interspersed with blue, in the "medicine" breath over bodies in the stream of life behind the goddess Hygieia. The enigmatic world spirit finally wafts brightly in technicolor green through the “philosophy”, casting shadows on bare bodies. That sounds pretty psychedelic.

Did Klimt's contemporaries see that as a shocker?

Or is that more AI than Klimt?

Smola believes that there is a “high probability” that the images actually looked the way they have now been reconstructed.

In any case, their new colors have made them less exciting.

Klimt versus Klimt and The Klimt Color Enigma

on artsandculture.google.com and the app.