This is very nice. On the other hand Van Gogh died in 1890 so his work should really be in the public domain. Here the Van Gogh Museum is claiming copyright on the reproductions as a separate work of art and using that to restrict what you can and cannot do with these images.
In the US, they can't. See Bridgeman vs. Corel. Despite whining from the museum community, nobody has successfully enforced a copyright on a public domain work in the US since then. This follows the Supreme Court decision in Feist vs. Rural Telephone, which wiped out copyright in telephone books as not being creative works. Bridgeman was followed by Meshwerks vs Toyota, which ruled that 3D scans of an object are not new works.
Yet another example of the modern "maximalist" copyright protection mindset.
My opinion is that, if a work is public domain, then any such format-shifting should also be public domain. I don't really see anything transformative in the Museum's usage of Van Gogh's work that would entitle them to protection.
I posit that within the next century, we will see the total death of the public domain. There are already those pushing for truly perpetual copyright out there, I ran into one such guy on (of all places) a C64 retro forum.
Fantastic resource but rendering (post-)impressionist paintings onto a 2d canvas removes a vital element from any such painting - the brushstrokes. I still remember the goose bumps I got when I first saw a Van Gogh for the first time; the paining felt alive.
Having said all that, I cannot afford an original Van Gogh so occasional visits to the Musee D'Orsay and Amsterdam will have to do :/
The only reason this is not more widely available is due to snobbery and elitism in the fine art world, IMO. Imagine a world in which there were only a single copy of every work of Beethoven.
"Perfectly reproduced" is a reach. "Reproduced with relief texture" is more accurate. A key reason these are inferior to hand-painted originals has less to do with snobbery and more to do material qualities of eg. oil paint and hand-stretched canvas. The idea that it is only elites who can tell the difference is an unsupported statement about art appreciation among the general population.
Is it just with relief texture? Sounds like they are 3d scanning and printing with the exact same texture. And if that's the case, it doesn't seem that hand stretched canvas would matter.
Sufficient resolution and materials with identical color and refractive qualities should get you a visually identical result.
Consider 3D reproductions of plates of food in restaurant displays. Can they really look edible? What level of texture would be "sufficient" in that case?
Food is made of many different elements, all of which have different reflective qualities. A 3D printed gravy-soaked chicken and salad, in far finer detail than is currently achievable, would still look fake, even from a distance. In many cases, oil paintings are made from paints with near-uniform reflective properties, which would work far better, assuming that such properties could be reproduced in some special-purpose 3D printing material.
Another challenge of reproducing art is that what makes the artwork so fantastic is the subtlest nuances. Those are not the 90% that many artists could do, but the .00001% that only Van Gogh could do. It's not just blue, or that shade of blue, or that precise shade ... but that unique color, in the context of all the other colors, on that spot on the canvas. Reproductions must have approximations and they must lose or weaken every nuance, unless the reproducer is another Van Gogh.
> The idea that it is only elites who can tell the difference is an unsupported statement about art appreciation among the general population.
Agreed and the argument often assumes that the impact of art is all conscious and explicit - 'people can't even tell you what the difference is' - when in fact artwork of any serious ambition aims far beyond what can be consciously noticed and enumerated (and again, those aims are achieved in the nuance). For my personal experience of it, museums are poorly set up, expecting me to engage with and grok dozens or more works in maybe an hour or two. Now I spend half an hour or more per work; that does mean skipping 95% them, but the experience is far more valuable, richer, and more gratifying. It's the difference between looking at vacation photos or visiting Italy.
I have considered getting an artist to reproduce a Van Gogh the old fashioned way - painting it.
Never went ahead with the idea but I assume (I am not a painter) that modern high quality oils would allow a reasonably talented artist to repro a Van Gogh to a sufficiently accurate degree. I just need it to "fool" me, not an expert.
They had over 100 artists produce 65,000 frames on 1000 canvases in the style of Van Gogh to animate the movie Loving Vincent. It took them 4 years to develop the technique and 2 years to do it all:
Funny enough, there are plenty of forgers out there that have no trouble fooling even the top experts. Many times, they have to resort to testing canvas and paint flecks and using special imaging technology to discern fake from original.
Huh, can't believe never came across one of these. Will order one now and see it for myself. Very excited, thank you! It's not grossly expensive too, seems like I can order one as low as $150 which is dirt cheap compared to how expensive furniture and decors usually are. Pretty amazing.
> The idea that it is only elites who can tell the difference is an unsupported statement about art appreciation among the general population.
Of course, I made no such statement -- you did. I wonder which of us has a lower opinion of the lay public's capacity to appreciate art.
Back to the matter at hand, I'm fairly confident that a technology which faithfully reproduced artwork at the molecular level would be met with just as much contempt and hostility in the "art world". It has less to do with any sort of concern about the quality of the reproduction than it does with an aversion to seeing fine art placed in the hands of the masses.
Thanks for the link! Didn't know the technology existed.
However, browsing the site it appears that only a few (250) repros are made available - such a pity. Hope the tech gets applied more widely.
Don't you think your perception of the painting was perhaps colored by the fact that you knew it was an original Van Gogh?
I have seen some Van Gogh paintings in person and I definitely wouldn't have known they were originals unless someone told me.
It kind of reminds me of people who claim you will never really have truly good sushi unless you get it from an old master in Tokyo. Or how people tend to like wine better if they are told it was very expensive.
> Don't you think your perception of the painting was perhaps colored by the fact that you knew it was an original Van Gogh?
Not OP, but I doubt it. The originals I've seen have a thick layer of paint on the surface which adds visible texture to the work. Van Gogh paintings are really a 3D experience, which just happen to also look great in 2D.
I agree. I'm not an art buff, but we live near some decent museums, and seeing any original oil painting has such an incredible depth and texture to it that it truly blew my mind, and actually made me appreciate and enjoy art a lot more than before seeing them in person.
Van Gogh was exceptionally good at using the texture and layers too, making them even more special when you see them AFK.
>Don't you think your perception of the painting was perhaps colored by the fact that you knew it was an original Van Gogh?
Speaking just for myself- I had a similar experience as the parent comment, and at the time, I was kind of 'meh' about even going to the museum in the first place. But my girlfriend at the time was majoring in art history, and she always had fascinating things to tell me to help fill in the missing context of whatever we saw together. So I thought that with her, the trip would be worth it.
And it was! But, and I can't stress this enough- Irises utterly captivated me (both of us, actually), before she had even uttered a word. the gap between the real thing and a flat reproduction is that wide.
I was familiar with Van Gogh's work long before I saw one in real life. The paintings on a 2d page did not have much impact. I only fell in love with the impressionists (not just Van Gogh) when I saw the original work - its the brush strokes that bring their work to life.
I recall seeing a brilliant red pointillist painting by some artist I had never heard of and the impact it had on me as I got close and each little red dot 'dancing' was surreal.
>Fantastic resource but rendering (post-)impressionist paintings onto a 2d canvas removes a vital element from any such painting - the brushstrokes. I still remember the goose bumps I got when I first saw a Van Gogh for the first time; the paining felt alive.
For what it's worth, I had exactly the same type of experience. It was Irises, in the Getty in Los Angeles back in the early 90's. Something I had 'seen' hundreds of times before, but only 'felt' once perceived taking the full structure of the shape of the oils and their interplay with light in to account. And in no way does someone need to be an art expert to appreciate the difference- it is not subtle. I feel lucky for being able to have done so.
If you zoom in on the image all the way with the controls (to load the highest detail tiles), and then zoom your browser window out all the way, the full-detail image will be rendered at full size and can be saved by right-clicking the canvas and asking to view the image in a new window, then saving that image. I’m currently enjoying a beautiful new desktop background :)
This is fantastic. Does anyone know of a tool to download the pictures, titles, and description to display as desktop backgrounds (for this and other museum sites)?
I’ve worked on dozens of these “print on demand” programs over the last 10+ years for museums and galleries like Tate, MoMA, The National Gallery etc. They are a fairly standard part of most museum’s retail operations, but this is a particularly nice example.
Licensing for fine art reproductions in museum retail can work in very strange ways, even if the work is out of copyright. For example, if a work is not part of the gallery’s collection, permission may be sought from the owner who may or may not own the high res, as well as the estate of the artist. I many cases this is not required as the work is not in copyright, but nobody wants to step out of line.
Art major in me made me giggle when I saw this site. I'm fortunate to live in area with relatively easy access to his paintings, but with such high quality reproduction, it's 'almost' as good as going to museum.
I'm amazed that this is online, but the Van Gogh museum experience was really fantastic. I got back from Amsterdam a little over a week ago and was impressed at how innovative it felt compared to US art museums I've visited. We happened to enter the The Van Gogh Dreams installation (https://vangoghmuseum.nl/en/whats-on/exhibitions/van-gogh-dr...) ahead of the main museum and I found it a very helpful experience before seeing the art.
Interesting you think that. Van Gogh was a great painter but the museum is really not that good. I went last year. I find most art museums where I live (NYC) more interesting IMHO.
They've also a no-photographs-policy and overly aggressive attendants who are just plain annoying.
Why is the no photographs policy a problem when you can get reproductions online? That piques my interest as a photographer. Off the top of my head, the layout and design of War Photos Limited in Dubrovnik (http://www.warphotoltd.com/) offered many more interesting opportunities for an interesting shot.
This is great. Can you point to any other similar sites, where I can download printable high res images of significant or interesting artwork? I found some at the Library of Congress, for example.
I certainly hope anyone who gets the idea to print these out will take a moment (or a year) to find the originals and appreciate the quality of the paint used before they try to get this impact out of a dot-matrix++ printer.
