By NINA SIEGAL
AMSTERDAM — New technology in 3-D printing is pushing boundaries in fields as disparate as medicine, architecture and weapons manufacturing, and now it has reached the art world. The race is on to produce high-quality 3-D reproductions of masterpieces by such artists as Rembrandt and Vincent van Gogh.
This year the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam teamed up with Fujifilm in Japan to produce the first fully color-corrected three-dimensional copies of some of van Gogh’s most famous works, including his 1889 “Sunflowers” and 1890 “Almond Blossom.”
Meanwhile, at the Technart conference here, researchers from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands unveiled 3-D reproductions of Rembrandt’s famous 1667 “Jewish Bride,” a Rembrandt self portrait and a van Gogh that they had made in cooperation with Océ, part of the Canon group.
The reproductions mimic not just the color, but also the thickness of the paint and the brushwork, and, in the case of the Fujifilm reproductions, include both the front and the back of the painting, as well as the frame. They can be best compared to reliefs, and in fact, the Fujifilm van Goghs have been named “Relievos.”
“This whole thing is really only the logical next step of reproductions of work of art,” said Axel Rüger, director of the Van Gogh Museum. “Early on, there were prints of various kinds, lithographs, later on photography was invented, so you had black and white, then color reproductions, and then digital photography made those better, and now you have three dimensions. Each step was always designed to get closer to the original.”
Fujifilm approached the Van Gogh Museum with the idea, Mr. Rüger said, and they agreed to participate for commercial reasons. The Van Gogh Museum, unlike other Dutch art institutions, is mostly self-financed, with 75 percent of its annual budget coming from ticket sales, museum-shop purchases and other earned income.
The Fujifilm Relievos are being sold for €25,000 each, about $34,000, in Hong Kong, and will help pay for renovations to the museum’s new wing and a new entrance. Of the five paintings that have been reproduced in 3-D, four have been printed in limited editions of 260, while one, “Sunflowers,” can be reproduced as often as there is a demand for it, said Linda Snoek, a Van Gogh Museum media officer. “It’s for people who want to have work by van Gogh, but, obviously, you can’t buy one of these,” Mr. Rüger said.
For its part, the Rijksmuseum agreed to participate with TU Delft and Océ to see if the reproductions might be useful for conservation, research or commercial purposes, said Robert van Langh, head of conservation and research at the Rijksmuseum, who facilitated the project at his museum for the TU Delft researchers. “I’m merely interested in the scientific advances we can make from these things,” he said. “The fact that you can make reproductions, that’s wonderful from the museum shop point of view, but I was curious if there’s any part of it that’s interesting to conservators. Right now, I’m not sure about how 3-D printing would be useful.”
The Fujifilm team spent seven years working with the Van Gogh Museum — which has the world’s largest collection of van Goghs — to come up with their Relievos. They made many versions of the prints using a technique known as Reliefography, which combines a 3-D scan of the painting with a high-resolution print. To make sure the color corresponded to the original, the Fujifilm researchers returned repeatedly to the museum to compare the copies against the originals, with the help and oversight of top museum curators.
Daniella Levy, who oversaw the day-to-day work on the project for Fujifilm, said: “It’s a one-to-one size reproduction, there’s an exact color match to the original, and it has the exact same brush strokes as the original, meaning the same height and the same direction,” she said. Our challenge was to match the texture of the original in structure and shape. It had to be in perfect registration. It cannot be half a millimeter left or right.”
To create its reproductions, the TU Delft team of researchers, Pieter Jonker, Jo Geraedts and Joris Dik, developed an imaging device to record both color and topographical data from painting surfaces. Tim Zaman, a graduate student, sat for two weeks with Rembrandt’s “The Jewish Bride” in the Rijksmuseum, while it was closed for renovations, and conducted 3-D scans of the painting. The researchers also used X-ray fluorescence to do a chemical analysis of the component parts of the pigments, and hyperspectral imaging, which collects color data from across the electromagnetic spectrum. Combing that information produced a “point cloud,” or a set of volumetric data akin to a three-dimensional pixel. Océ made the high-resolution 3-D print based on the color information it got from TU Delft.
The TU Delft/Océ team has not made any of its reproductions available for sale. “The reproduction market is one field where this is interesting, but from an academic point of view I see many more interesting challenges,” Mr. Dik said. For example, he said museums could use 3-D printing technology to make more realistic reconstructions of paintings that have been damaged or have faded over time.
The 3-D scanning techniques being developed to “look inside” the paint layers could also help art experts learn about the structure of a work. “Conservators and art historians are interested in learning about the paint layers,” Mr. Dik said, “just as geologists are interested in different layers in strata of earth, which tells you about the genesis of the Earth’s crust. The same concept applies to artworks, because sometimes artists applied an under-painting or an under-drawing, and you usually find a whole package of layers that you didn’t see with the naked eye.”
Mr. van Langh at the Rijksmuseum said he thought that might be a bit of a stretch. “It’s really only surface analysis that we’re using right now,” he said.
Mr. van Langh does, however, suggest that 3-D scans could be useful to museums if they are planning to loan their art to other institutions. Documenting the cracks or imperfections in a painting before it is loaned and when it is returned could help them learn about the impact of travel on the work, he said.
The limited-edition reproductions from the Van Gogh museum are so far only on sale in Hong Kong, which the museum felt was a good test market. “In Asia van Gogh is incredibly popular and it’s the right market for it,” said Mr. Rüger. “We’re going to launch in Taiwan next, and others will follow.”
Mr. Zaman, the student who worked on the Rembrandt reproduction, said that the copies produced so far don’t come anywhere near the originals. “What we still cannot capture is the luminescence of the paintings, small things like how the original painting has certain tiny particles of paint in it that shine,” he said. “The original is still light years ahead of our print. But, then again, our 3-D print is light years ahead of a 2-D poster. So, we’re getting somewhere.”
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