Now a team of scientists and art conservators from Northwestern University and the Art Institute of Chicago has used a simple light bulb, an SLR camera and computational power to uncover new details of Gauguin's printmaking process -- how he formed, layered and re-used imagery to make 19 unique graphic works in the Art Institute's collection. Northwestern computer scientist Oliver S. Cossairt will provide a surprising new explanation of how Gauguin created one of these artworks Saturday, Feb. 14, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in San Jose. It will be the first report of the Northwestern-Art Institute study of the 3-D surface of the print "Nativity (Mother and Child Surrounded by Five Figures)," made by Gauguin in 1902. For this project, the scientists can use the shifting light “to mathematically separate color from surface shape, providing a much clearer view of the paper's topography,” according to a press release. A light bulb was moved to 20 different locations and a photo taken of the artwork for each light bulb position. (Each digital image is 10 megapixels, meaning the researchers processed 20 million pixels for each artwork.) Some findings were previously unknown to art experts, such as how the artist achieved certain types of lines, and they indicated that a “monotype” printmaking process was used. “For Gauguin scholarship, it’s just one more chapter,” Groom says of the Northwestern project.
– The French artist Paul Gauguin may be best known for his paintings—one of which sold just this month for $300 million, one of the highest prices ever paid for a work of art—but the printmaking he worked on toward the end of his life in the early 1900s is turning out to be so complicated and experimental that art conservators are "blown away" by the new findings, reports Northwestern University. Computer scientist Oliver S. Cossairt, who announced the findings in San Jose over the weekend, worked with art conservation specialists at the Art Institute of Chicago to reveal Gauguin's surprising techniques, including layering, transferring, and re-using imagery. Since September, the team has been analyzing 19 of the artist's prints at the Art Institute—the most in-depth analysis being of the work "Nativity (Mother and Child Surrounded by Five Figures)," completed in 1902 a year before Gauguin's death—using a process that dates back to the 1980s called photometric stereo. It entails taking a sequence of photos from a fixed camera while light on the subject jumps to a new position. Software then helps separate out color from surface shape to detail the paper's topography. Cossairt tells Newsweek the process is "simple" but still "labor intensive," with 20 million pixels processed for each print. One finding: Gauguin made white lines by drawing on an ink surface, thereby removing the ink, and transferred the resulting lines to the print. (Check out why one woman attacked a Gauguin painting in Washington's National Gallery.)