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Che to Warhol to Wolfram

Posted 2 years ago

enter image description here

In the spirit of Andy Warhol's famous painting (above), I have created this montage of images (below) based on the same photo of Che Guevara but in the stye, via the Wolfram Language's Restyle function, of twelve different famous artists. Can you guess which artists?

enter image description here

As correct answers come in, I'll confirm them.

Disclosures:

  • Andy Warhol didn't actually paint the 9-panel image, but he is generally credited for it.
  • Che Guevara was not the benevolent, romantically heroic freedom fighter that the image implies. I think that the photo is so good that it has propelled him to cultural icon status in spite of the historical truth.
  • All of the artists represented here are male. That is just an accident of which renders turned out well in the neural net. I am not trying to make a statement by omitting female artists. (But I think the neural net is definitely biased.)

Have fun figuring out this little puzzle. : )

POSTED BY: Mark Greenberg
23 Replies

Alright, #3: Renoir...? Or if not, my other guess is George Seurat. It looks borderline pointillism. Are you going to tell us how you did it? Was it manual or programmed?

POSTED BY: Claudio Argento
Posted 2 years ago

Claudio, your guesses for #3 are reasonable but not correct. #3 is an American artist named LeRoy Neiman. All the guesses centered around Impressionism and Pointillism, which image #3 definitely indicates. Unless you are familiar with Neiman's choice of colors, it would be difficult to get that one.

The other remaining image that hasn't been identified is #11. It is Alphonse Mucha, a Czech artist most identified with Art Nouveau.

There's nothing clever about the code. I just chose a representative image from an artist's work and used it to style the Che photo:

ImageRestyle[cheImg, .87 -> miroImg, PerformanceGoal -> "Quality"]

Each render took about 45 minutes, and sometimes I had to experiment with the weight (the .87 in the example) to get it right. With higher weights, Che is less recognizable. The default weight is .5, but the results seem to be more interesting with higher weights. For the project I'm working on right now, a revised version of the game Chicken Scratch, I rendered out 76 such images, some with the Che photo and some with a photo of Albert Einstein. I tried other base images including the Mona Lisa and Nelson Mandela, but Guevara and Einstein produced the most interesting results. I think it was the hair and eyes on both that caught the neural net's attention. My favorite is the Che/Hokusai in the 12-panel image at the top of this post.

POSTED BY: Mark Greenberg
Posted 2 years ago

No, not Matisse, though the bright colors and fuzzy edged shapes do fit some of Matisse's paintings. Artist #3 was an American painter.

POSTED BY: Mark Greenberg

And now I think #5 was not Gris either...more likely Marcel Duchamp.

POSTED BY: Daniel Lichtblau
Posted 2 years ago

Artist #5 is not Juan Gris, though thanks for introducing me to another Cubist. : ) Image #5 is based on the artist's painting style, though the artist was known more for his... well, we'll call them sculptures.

POSTED BY: Mark Greenberg

Okay, so I think I have #5 finally. As #3 is American, I see some likeness to a few works of Childe Hassam, but that's a stretch. I remain dead in the water for #11.

POSTED BY: Daniel Lichtblau
Posted 2 years ago

For image #11, if it were a female face instead of Che Guevara's you would probably recognize the artist. Hassam is not correct for #3. You say you have #5; what is your guess?

POSTED BY: Mark Greenberg

Marcel Duchamp for #5 (I had added that to a prior response but after you had already seen it).

POSTED BY: Daniel Lichtblau
Posted 2 years ago

Yes, Daniel, Marcel Duchamp for #5 is correct. He was more famous for claiming that a polished urinal was art than for his paintings. His paintings captured motion in a Cubist kind of way, something lost in the ImageRestyle version.

POSTED BY: Mark Greenberg

Henri Rousseau for #1 and Georges Braque for #5?

POSTED BY: Daniel Lichtblau
Posted 2 years ago

Henri Rousseau is right for #1. He is known for his tropical jungle scenes and you can see the tropical foliage in image #1. Georges Braque is #6, but #5 is another artist.

POSTED BY: Mark Greenberg

Oops, I missed that Braque was taken. Maybe Juan Gris for #5 then, and Henri Matisse for #3?

POSTED BY: Daniel Lichtblau

It is a Pollock!!! #9

POSTED BY: Claudio Argento
Posted 2 years ago

It is in fact Jackson Pollock for #9. Great job! I updated the previous grid.

POSTED BY: Mark Greenberg
Posted 2 years ago

Arno, I don't have a coding gem that would solve the puzzle. Now you have got me thinking how one would do that. With a list of artists, one might gather images from WikiData or Wikipedia and use Nearest to get some metrics to determine which is most likely a match for a particular image. I'll have some time later today and give it a shot.

POSTED BY: Mark Greenberg
Posted 2 years ago

Two reasonable guesses, Claudio, but not correct. Think a little more abstract, less photo-representational, especially for #9.

enter image description here

POSTED BY: Mark Greenberg

What we're all hoping for, of course, Mark, is that you will afterwards show us how to solve this riddle computationally :-)

POSTED BY: Arno Bosse
Posted 2 years ago

I did try gathering images from Wikipedia via the WikipediaData function, deleting any that weren't 3-channel images to eliminate black-and-white photos and 4-channel icons, and extracting features (FeatureExtraction) to abstract an artist's "style". Then I compared each artist's style with the restyled image in question using FeatureDistance. This did produce a set of metrics that I had hoped would point to the restyled image's artist. The numbers did not identify the artist though. They were not even close enough to lead me to believe that further effort would produce better results.

I'll leave this challenge for someone else in the Community to attempt. : )

POSTED BY: Mark Greenberg

My guesses: #3 Monet and #9 Munch

POSTED BY: Claudio Argento
Posted 2 years ago

Arno, you got two more.

enter image description here

POSTED BY: Mark Greenberg

Nice! Using the same numbering scheme, #6 Georges Braque and #4 Joan Miró? More tentatively, #5 Ernst Kirchner?

POSTED BY: Arno Bosse
Posted 2 years ago

Good start, John. You got 5 of them. Here are the correct answers so far:

enter image description here

POSTED BY: Mark Greenberg

Interesting puzzle! If the top left is #1 and bottom right is #12 then going from left to right then top to bottom, I’m going to guess 2 is Hokusai, 4 is Chagall, 7 is Van Gogh, 8 is Mondrian, and 10 is Lichtenstein. 12 is probably Picasso but I’m less sure about that one, Beyond that I got nothing.

POSTED BY: John Shonder
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