Creating, Visualizing, Analyzing, and Comparing Series of Artworks

Carlos Monroy, Richard Furuta, and Enrique Mallen

Outline

• The On-line Picasso Project

• Timeline-based visualizations

• Visualizing and creating series

• Conclusions and future work

• Questions and answers

The On-line Picasso Project

• Is a Web-based reasoned catalogue

• Containing about 7000 photographs of Picasso’s artworks

• A detailed biography of Pablo Picasso, with linked photographs and maps

• A list of bibliographical references about Picasso’s works and life

• A collection of news items and articles from newspapers, magazines, and journals

A reasoned catalogue

• illustrations of the works

• information about title, time and place of execution, medium employed, dimensions, current location of the work, former owners

• past exhibitions in museums and/or galleries, previous illustrations in books, etc.

Or “catalogue raisonné” is an extensive compilation of the works done by an artist, including:

A reasoned catalogue… (continued)

Scholarly commentaries on the artwork (its relation to other works, its importance in the artist's career, its formal structure, etc.)

The On-line Picasso Project

Visualizing and Exploring Picasso’s World

• The on-line repository allows users to browse and visualize the items and their metadata

• Some limitations due to the collection’s static HTML-based presentation

• The challenge is how to explore the collection to discover:

• facts

• patterns

• relationships

• membership and orderings

Overview +Detail

Overview

1st level of detail

2nd level of detail

3rd level of detail

Uncertain Data in Picasso’s Collection

Uncertainty when he started and/or ended an artworkUncertainty where he painted an artwork

Color fading scheme used to depict uncertain data for dates

Analyzing Picasso’s World

• Is there a pattern in what Picasso painted during specific seasons? • How did events in his personal life influence his paintings? • Which patterns can be identified between different decades?• What determines membership in a distinct series? • How do the various series correlate with each other?

Discovering Patterns

Picasso’s artistic production in 1927.

Filtering the dataset

Artworks created in Paris in 1927

Series in Picasso

Why series are important?

• Recognize and place particular works at the right

location and time

• Find a specific order

• Discover thematic and formal correlations

• Correlate Picasso’s artworks from distant periods

• Allow multiple orderings for works based on alternate

dates/places of execution

Some catalogs about Picasso

•Zervos (entire works)

•Palau i Fabre (early years and cubism)

•Daix and Rosselet (cubism)

•Daix and Boudaille (early years)

•Musée Picasso Paris (collection in the Museum)

•Bloch (etchings)

•Baer (etchings)

•Mourlot (lithographs)

•Spies (statues)

•Ramie (ceramics)

Creating Series

Animating Series

Comparing Series

Base series

Comparison series

Depicting Series in Context

Catalog of Series

Conclusions

Its flexibility and interaction features can help art scholars to analyze series of artworks

The visualization tool enables the viewer to relate works from distant periods

Depicting multiple series in parallel enables users to compare different art critics orders

Identify thematic and formal correlations in artworks

Future Work

After adding other media, we expect to answer questions

such as;

How do sculptures, ceramics, etchings, etc. relate to

drawings and oils?

By including texts written by Picasso we expect to address

the relationships between his writings and series of

artworks

Create XML catalogues

Usability tests to evaluate the users response to the tool

Acknowledgements

The Humanities Informatics Initiative funded by the Office of the Vice President for Research through a Telecommunications and Informatics Task Force grant

Additional support from the College of Engineering, the College of Liberal Arts, the Glasscock Center, and the Texas A&M University Libraries