Art is now in the Windows of the beholder.
Computer screens that heretofore were home to spreadsheets, accounts-payable files, word-processing programs and games may now, when prompted, bring forth the impeccably defined and richly colored image of a voluptuous Renoir nude or mystical Cezanne landscape.
And artists have found a new electronic tool as useful to their craft as the paintbrush.
Computer technology and the art world have at long last embraced each other, producing limitless possibilities and new ways to display, reproduce, study, store, share and even create art.
A large and growing number of computer software companies and arts institutions are involved in these explorations, but among the first pioneers are Bill Gates’ Microsoft Corp. and its Corbis publishing subsidiary, and such museums as the Art Institute of Chicago, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Washington’s National Gallery of Art.
Joining Corbis in one of the first museum leaps into cyberspace, however, has been the obscure and rather mysterious Barnes Collection of suburban Philadelphia.
It has 180 paintings by Pierre Auguste Renoir, plus masterpieces by Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Amedeo Modigliani, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and many more famous names. The Barnes has been called the greatest collection of post-Impressionist art in the world.
After the death of Albert Barnes, an eccentric and misanthropic millionaire physician who amassed the collection, the works were hidden away in his museum/mansion outside Philadelphia. A recent court order briefly freed a selection of these masterworks from the restrictions of his will and permitted them to be temporarily exhibited at the National Gallery and several other major museums.
Then back they went, out of circulation. Now, they reappear through the magic of computer technology on a CD-ROM produced by Corbis called “A Passion for Art.”
This isn’t just a computer slide show or electronic art catalog. It re-creates on the computer screen the 24 galleries of the sprawling exhibition.
When the program begins running, a view of the museum appears on the screen. By clicking a mouse, a user “moves” through doors and “looks” in different directions to see the art inside the galleries.
Moving electronically, a user enters the first gallery and turns left from Renoir’s 1910 “Reclining Nude” to look at another wall and his 1897 “Reclining Nude.” Turning to the right with another click of the mouse, one finds Cezanne’s 1906 “Nudes in a Landscape,” among other great pieces.
In the next chamber, there’s a Degas grouping of nudes. To its left, finally, is a much more chaste Monet painting, “Madame Monet Embroidering.”
You can call up a full view of any picture, use a zoom to view it more closely and a “super zoom” to see small details. You can use the computer to sweep the eye across a canvas as one would in an actual museum.
There also is an encyclopedic listing of paintings, complete with histories of individual artists and informative interpretations of what particular works are about. Should you wonder, for example, about the preponderance of nudes, you need only summon one of the CD-ROM’s tour guides, in this case, J. Carter Brown, director emeritus of the National Gallery.
Barnes, it seems, had quite a thing for naked ladies, or as Brown puts it in the sound portion of his tour, “the nude was a recurring focus of Barnes’ eye and taste.”
There’s music, as well–ragtime and jazz–reflecting the period of the paintings being viewed. It’s easy to spend as much time touring the exhibition via computer as one might in person, and learn far more than one would from wall texts.
“This will never approach the experience of the original, and shouldn’t,” Brown says. “The glory is, in my own view, that it will send people flocking to the originals, as a result of their heightened interest and understanding.
“There is a thrill to being in the presence of the original, made by that person, and his hand or her hand touched that canvas. That’s pretty exciting. What museums have to overcome is the intimidation that people have when they go in and think there must be a lot to this that they don’t know.
“I’ve always felt that this canard–that I know what I like–is really in reverse. It’s more accurately, I like what I know. In my own museum-going, I gravitate to the galleries of art I’ve studied or know about, and get a little puzzled in some of the others. can prepare a museumgoer for a visit to an extraordinary degree.”
Brown was one of the team that created “A Passion for Art,” which Corbis is selling for between $40 and $50 at software stores, bookstores and museum shops as well as through mail-order catalogs and mass market and warehouse clubs.
Bill Gates, now the richest person on the Forbes 400 list with a personal wealth of $9.35 billion, sees this kind of electronic art appreciation as a means of making even more money.
“I do have a love of art,” he says, “but this is also very much a business opportunity.”
Corbis’ strategic goal is to compile a massive archive of art images in the digitized form that computers can display and manipulate. Because virtually all of the existing photos of art are not yet in this digital form, Corbis’ plan is to perform the conversions and market the results.
Once an image is digitized, it can be placed in a computer’s memory and then fed to any other computer where the user wants to view that image. Once the image is beamed into a computer via telephone links–a process called downloading–the picture can be used in forms as diverse as publishing a glossy national magazine or decorating an individual’s own computer screen.
And Gates is tinkering with computer projectors that can re-create an image on a giant-size wall screen in the same dimensions as the original art work. Should you want Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Bellini’s “Feast of the Gods” gracing your dining room, a few keystrokes could put it there.
He has installed high-resolution screens of this sort in his own $35 million house on the shores of Seattle’s Lake Washington.
Corbis is at work all over the world using computer digitizing cameras to copy art, as it did with the Barnes collection, Gates says. More important to the strategy, Corbis also is obtaining licenses and copyrights that will allow it to be the sole distributor of those images in the future.
“We are building tremendous value with this project,” he says. “We not only have acquired the actual images of the artwork or other subjects, we have the needed licenses and other permissions to market it.”
Eventually, Corbis plans to invest $10 billion in its electronic archive, anticipating the swiftly approaching time when American homes are connected to high-speed computer lines supplied by telephone companies or cable TV operations.
The World Wide Web, which transforms sites on the Internet into a graphical interface much like what one encounters using a CD-ROM, is being incorporated by museums, including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, as a medium to make exhibitions and curatorial and archival material available throughout the world. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History has transformed its huge new “Ocean Planet” exhibit into components available on World Wide Web.
Computer users who reach the “home page,” or Internet address, of the University of Wyoming’s art museum can download onto their screens great Western landscape paintings by Albert Bierstadt. The “home page” of the Tucson Museum of Art will deliver Roberto Marquez’s “Sojourns in the Labyrinth.” And on “Le Web Louvre” one can find 200 famous images from that museum’s collection, including a very satisfying computer reproduction of the Mona Lisa.
According to Alan Newman, executive director of the Art Institute’s imaging and technical services department, his museum was among the first to go high tech.
“We’ve been at it seven or more years,” he says, “with an emphasis on education and information.”
Like Brown’s National Gallery, which is storing images of much of its collection on laser discs for archival and school use, the Art Institute has created programs and presentations on laser disc as well as CD-ROM using images of works in its immense collection.
One of Newman’s favorite projects is “With Open Eyes,” a highly entertaining children’s computer program that uses 250 of the Art Institute’s masterpieces and was published as a laser disc last year. On Friday, a CD-ROM version, compatible with Macintosh or Windows, went on sale for $39.95
Next year, the museum plans to bring forth “Cleopatra,” a computer program featuring 50 objects from its Ancient Art collection that allows users to examine coins and sculpture from all sides and travel through the interiors of Egyptian tombs via computer-generated images.
Among those who will be watching the development of these Art Institute programs, and others used in the conservation and archeology of art, is the giant Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“One of the things exciting about all this is that, as you begin to see more of these projects evolve having to do with the arts, it creates a lot of back and forth and collaboration among cultural institutions,” says Kent Lydecker, the Metropolitan’s director for education.
The computer is also moving swiftly into the worlds of art teaching and art creation.
“It’s like a big bear coming down the road to everybody,” says New York artist Jerry Kearns, who also is a professor of art at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “The shift is going on dramatically, in terms of technology becoming a real central player in art programs.”
Kearns has been widely exhibited here and in Germany, and his large-scale paintings, on display at New York’s Kent Gallery and San Francisco’s Modernism gallery, sell for between $18,000 and $24,000. He specializes in collages that combine images–often classical figures superimposed over pop-art renderings–and finds the computer ideal for these creations.
“It’s the most extraordinary collage technology ever to come around, for people who work with accumulating imagery from a variety of sources, and in transforming those images and working with them in layers,” he says. “The end product can be whatever you want. You can even feed TV imagery directly into your computer, or use an electronic camera of your own–just about any source you can imagine.”
Kearns’ downtown studio is equipped with about $15,000 in computer gear, built around an 8100 series Macintosh and a digitizing transformation device known as a Sy-Quest, and including a high-quality monitor and a printer that uses colored ink-jet sprays.
“The quality is just incredible,” he says, “–the ranges of the inks, the subtleties of variation, the diversity of texture.”
Is the quality so good that someday art computers actually may replace artists? At least one artist/inventor has built and programmed a computer with a special ink-jet computer that randomly paints pictures of humans–working from the knowledge fed it.
“It’s a really wonderful electronic tool that has certain very helpful applications,” Kearns says. “But there are other things it cannot do. . . . It’s not going to make someone who isn’t an artist an artist.”
