A.I. Art in the Style of Modern Masters

Photo Essay

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“Lamp Post in the Marsh” in the style of James McNeil Whistler, image generated by Midjourney

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Midjourney is only one of several A.I. art-generating applications that are available at the moment. I realize A.I. “art” is a sensitive topic to many but I’m not terribly worried that it will replace human creativity—except maybe when it comes to “content-generation,” which I personally don’t consider to be all that creative. When A.I. gets it wrong, it really gets it wrong and, while the sophistication of the algorithms are daily being refined and improved upon, I feel that the lack of human intuition will in the end prove the limitations of the tool.

Midjourney has become something of a private obsession of mine ever since a friend (in his early 30s) showed me (old dude in his 50s) how to use it. So far I’ve been able to make awesome illustrations for my stories on Substack, but I’ve also been using it as a sort of meditation tool, like the reading of Tarot cards.

Sidebar: Speaking of Tarot cards, Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies is a short novel about a group of people who gather in a castle and tell their stories by pointing at a spread of Tarot cards on a table. Then they choose a second path through the spread and reveal a second story, somehow linked to the stories of the other people at the table. Just thought I’d mention that, since it’s such a fun tale.

In the last two hours I’ve created hundreds of images “in the style of” a few famous modern masters. I employed very specific prompts that were (in all fairness) worded in a way that I hoped would tap into distinct qualities and peculiarities of each artist. Interestingly, my attempts to create images based on surrealists (like Salvador Dalí and René Magritte) have not yielded satisfactory results. This is philosophically compelling to me because it highlights the literalism of A.I. art. Separately, many artists’ styles and color palettes have been excluded from Midjourney. Therefore, things like the distinctly dunny ochres and yellows that Egon Schiele uses in his rooftop paintings or the way Georgia O’Keefe creates the elegant volutes of flowers can’t be reproduced in the application.

Below I’ve named the pieces based more-or-less on the prompts I used to generate them. As I mentioned the prompts have been intentionally catered to each artist whose style I was trying to get Midjourney to imitate. I’ve added my own personal critique in the captions of the twelve images below.

1. - Marble Cake in Marbled Mirror (M. C. Escher)

While I like this, I think Escher would have used the same pattern in the table tiles and the wall to make it even more camouflaged. Also, his version would likely have been in black and white. It makes sense to me that A.I. art can imitate Escher better than it can other surrealists, since his work is so mathematically balanced and is based on patterns that are easily convertible into computational arrays.

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2. - Strange Feeling in the Stomach While Sleeping on the Edge of Destruction (Oskar Kokoschka)

Notice the hand coming out of the stomach (“feeling in the stomach”),. One of the quirks of A.I. art at the moment is that it has a hard time understanding human limbs. Sometimes when generating an image of a person that is supposed to be realistic, the person will have extra fingers on their hands, or they will be sprouting hands out of their wrists and other such absurdities. But it’s a beautiful image.

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3. - Woman Reacting to the Horror of Time Advancing (Lucian Freud)

This one is unsettling and I thought it captured the style of Lucian Freud rather nicely.

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4. - Byzantine Queen Dreaming of Herself in Love (Gustav Klimt)

I cheated on this one and decided to keep all four panels of the “sample run” as one piece of art. It seemed like a Klimt-ish thing to do, like the Beethoven Frieze. So it’s essentially four copies of herself dreaming of herself.

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5. - Weimar Nightclub Connected to a Windmill (George Grosz)

I was thinking of merging a Weimar pub with the “Moulin Rouge,” but decided on simply using a “windmill” as the prompt. I liked the result. It fairly imitates Grosz’s style, except that the facial features are not as distinct and as grotesque as his. Faces in his works are usually heavy with face-paint, rouge, and exaggerated eyelashes and mustache whiskers.

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6. - Mother with Guitar Serenading Dying Babe (Pablo Picasso “Blue Period”)

This is a disturbing image but it doesn’t feel like something Picasso would have produced. Again, notice how off the hands are. I don’t think this is attributable simply to Picasso’s “abstract” style.

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7. - Department Store Closed, No One Told the Makeup Counter (Edward Hopper)

This was an intentionally absurd prompt, but the execution of it is intriguing. It’s unclear what the box-shaped objects on the counter are supposed to be. Part of me wonders if the boxes were variations on the theme of “Christmas presents” on a counter in a department store during the holidays.

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8. - Boy Teaching Brother How to Ring Up Customers (Norman Rockwell)

That’s not a cash register. Perhaps the imagine was patterned on a Rockwellian soda fountain. The boy on the right has at least six digits on his hand. Also the lettering on the newspapers in the back and the glasses with the strange liquid in it are bizarre. The old timer in the background is very close to something you would see in a Norman Rockwell painting, but he looks like a bookie instead of a shopkeeper.

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9. - Unhappy Street Sweep (Alfred Kubin)

This one is spot on, but then most of Kubin’s work consists of simple chiaroscuro sketches like this, so I think these kinds of things are easier for A.I. to recognize. I liked it.

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10. - Lighthouse in a Field of Sunflowers (Vincent Van Gogh)

The texture of the brushstrokes is off, but it’s visually striking

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11. Salome Dancing Before the Head of the House Appropriations Committee (Lawrence Alma-Tadema)

The “severed head” of John the Baptist cannot be produced in Midjourney, so I used another meaning of “head” to see what would happen. Interestingly “Head of the House Appropriations Committee” was incomprehensible to Midjourney. Instead, Salome dances holding an empty salver, which likely had the head of John the Baptist sitting on it originally in whatever image was used as the basis for Salome. This interpretation of Salome is a bit brutish for a Pre-Raphaelite artist like Alma-Tadema. Notice the strange lettering and transparent symbols at the edge of the image. Not sure what those are, unless they were part of another image that had a label on it.

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12. - Trying to Attract a Mate by Brooding in a Cafe over a Laptop (Edvard Munch)

Fitting image to end the night with.

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