AI Project Aims to Transform Art Preservation with Color Reconstruction

Just over 130 years ago, Norwegian painter Edvard Munch went on a fateful evening walk that changed the course of art forever.

“The Sun was setting. The clouds turned the color red like blood,” Munch wrote in one of his notebooks. “I painted this image, painted the clouds like real blood. The colors screamed.”

Thus, The Scream (1893) was born.

Time and circumstance have stifled the shrieks of Munch’s famed image: There are four versions of The Scream, two paintings and two pastel drawings; the colors in all of them have faded or degraded after more than a century of exposure to varying light and humidity. And the theft of the 1910 version in 2004 guaranteed an unfortunate acceleration of that process for at least the one copy: recovered in 2006, it was found to have new moisture damage on the lower-left side. Munch’s lurid colors—the blood reds and deep blues as he saw them himself—seemed more irretrievable for the modern viewer than ever.

All artworks face this same destiny to age. But for the 12 organizations involved in the European Union–backed PERCEIVE project, a solution has never appeared more attainable: authentic color reconstruction with the aid of rapidly evolving artificial intelligence tools.

Launched early last year, PERCEIVE is an international collaboration that aims to create “a service-based AI architecture and tool kit,” meant for use by experts and laypeople alike. Institutions like the MUNCH Museum in Oslo, Norway; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Victoria & Albert Museum in London; and the National Archaeological Museum of Naples have joined the three-year project, providing data on the artworks in their collections. Technology companies like Fraunhofer-IGD and imki, among others, have offered the manpower to train and create AI infrastructure using that data as a foundation.

The hope is that the development of a package of tools will bolster the ability of conservators, curators, and others to study and digitally reconstruct the original colors of five key groups of art: statues, paintings and works on paper, textiles, photographs, and augmented reality artworks.

For MUNCH, this has meant training its focus on the color chemistry of two versions of The Scream: an oil painting on cardboard and a hand-colored print. Conservators at other institutions have been gathering information on works like Paul Cézanne’s delicate Road in Provence (circa 1885) at the Art Institute of Chicago, and frescoes irrevocably transformed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples.

At the 6th annual International Conference on Innovation in Art Research and Technology (InART) in Oslo this past June, several PERCEIVE researchers displayed prototypes of their tools and gave stakeholders an opportunity to evaluate the progress they’ve made over the last year and a half.

One faction of PERCEIVE, under the conceptual guidance of Lucerne University’s Arthur Clay, presented what they call an “Autochrome Demonstrator,” a device that allows users to digitally restore Autochrome plates, and then magnify restored and original layers for side-by-side comparison. InART visitors also had the chance to experience the VR Chroma Demonstrator, a virtual environment that exhibits and preserves augmented reality art.

On MUNCH’s behalf, Irina Crina Anca Sandu—the museum’s in-house conservation scientist and lead on the PERCEIVE project—and her colleagues brought what she calls “The Scream Time Machine,” an interactive program that allows users to witness a digitized “step-by-step evolution of The Scream over time.” The program can conjure up a version of The Scream as it looked in 1893 or as it might look in 2093 and beyond.

“We are going to travel in time,” Sandu told ARTnews.

With funding for PERCIEVE set to expire in 2026, Sandu said, researchers hope that by the end all the prototypes unveiled at InART—and those not yet revealed—will have evolved into widely accessible programs ranging from a general repository of color knowledge to a light-damage estimator or web-based color prediction service.

While Sandu and the other scientists on the PERCEIVE team won’t attempt any physical alterations to the subjects of their case studies at this time, the project’s emphasis on the concepts of “authenticity and sense of care” addresses what William Wei, a veteran conservation scientist and author of Innovative Technology in Art Conservation, said he considers an important aspect of conservation ethics: “What do you do with an object if you want to restore it or conserve it?”

Think of an artifact like a famous journalist’s sweater, worn on her last-ever reporting mission, said Wei, who is unaffiliated with PERCEIVE. It’s torn and a little sweaty. “Are we allowed to sew it together? Because that means using new materials. Are we allowed to wash it because then we’ve washed DNA away? … What are we allowed to do? … It’s like medical ethics. It’s ‘What are you allowed to do with the patient?’”

Digitally reproducing or manipulating an artifact or artwork raises many of the same philosophical questions. The Scream presented a particularly poignant example of the consortium’s joint dedication to answering questions like Wei’s and looking beyond just the hard-and-fast science, Sandu commented.

“It’s always important that, when I make an interpretation of this data, I bring in the context,” Sandu said. “The first context for The Scream, in this case, is what Munch writes: how he got inspired from nature, from these colors of the sunsets.”

And, she added, conservators need to think about what Munch, as a once living human being who struggled with mental health issues, said he felt when he stopped and stared at that sunset: “tired and sick,” he wrote.

“He somehow, in my opinion, is able to translate all this turmoil,” she said. “The Scream is part of the universal heritage of humanity. It has a message. We found this message in the present, but we also are due to take it with us into the future, even beyond our lifetime. And using these artificial intelligence technologies and prototyping, we are able to do this.”

This feature is part of our latest digital issue, AI and the Art World. Follow along for more stories throughout this week and next.