The exhibition ‘Klimt: Pigment and Pixel’ at the Lower Belvedere.
The exhibition ‘Klimt: Pigment and Pixel’ at the Lower Belvedere. An attempt to understand creativity with X-rays and AI
From 20 February to 7 September 2025, the Lower Belvedere is showing a special exhibition ‘Gustav Klimt – Pigment and Pixel’. Strictly speaking, it is not a must-see if you are an artist with a capital letter and you want to retain the feeling that the creative process is magic and metaphysics.
If you are interested in the technological secrets of creativity, you will certainly learn a lot about how Gustav Klimt worked with precious metals to achieve a unique effect on his paintings. In addition, several of Klimt’s key masterpieces from the Belvedere collection have been moved to the Lower Belvedere Orangery for the duration of the exhibition.
A peek under the pigment layer
Although X-rays have long been used to examine paintings, it is only recently that museums, including the Belvedere, have acquired their own equipment to take large-format images of paintings (such as Klimt’s ‘The Kiss’). For this exhibition, several paintings have been subjected to radiological analysis for the first time. Sometimes the results reveal interesting compositional changes, sometimes they reveal the personality of the model, but never the meaning of the painting.
The secret to golden effects
Judith’ and “Sunflower”, which are no longer in the Upper Belvedere for the duration of the exhibition, are essential for the study of the technology of working with gold. Klimt used the oldest method of gilding, namely gold leaf. But unlike medieval masters he painted on canvas, not on wooden panels. And the research materials and the results of experiments allow us to reconstruct with a high degree of probability two fundamentally different methods, which Klimt used during his ‘golden period’.
Get ready to watch a lot of videos explaining in detail how exactly the restorers, curators and artificial intelligence specialists worked, to find out the composition of pigments, the technology of Klimt’s work and the specifics of colour restoration from black and white photographs with the help of algorithms.
The reconstruction of lost paintings
Such detail, which accompanies the viewer throughout several blocks of the exhibition, is necessary because the central project – the reconstruction of the so-called faculty canvases – does not have the effect one would expect.
The Faculty Paintings are three large-format paintings painted by Gustav Klimat for the main hall of the University of Vienna. The paintings, which caused public outcry and even scandal in their time, perished in a fire in May 1945. However, the black-and-white pictures have survived, and it was these that experts tried to ‘colour’.
This attempt, which of course was very tempting to undertake at a time of faith in the power of artificial intelligence, is not that it failed. But the ‘reconstructed’ paintings, being the same format as the originals, and being recoloured according to the latest science, leave one feeling like a mere shadow of the original.Although no pixels are visible on the multiply enlarged surface, the reconstruction looks depressingly flat.And its cheerful colouring only makes you regret the unattainability of recreating lost originals. That sounds like good news to me. Despite progress, in art the algorithm does not play a decisive role and we still need an artist to create experiences and reflections.
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