Museum Asks Public to Reinvent a Classic Painting, With Wild Results

Girl With a Pearl Earring? Much more like Dude With an Apple AirPod. 

The Mauritshuis museum in The Hague set out an open call for imaginative can take on Johannes Vermeer’s vintage 17th century painting — with some bizarre and pleasant outcomes. 

Scroll through posts tagged #mygirlwithapearl on Instagram and you can expect to uncover additional than 4,500 interpretations of the well-known oil portray of a youthful female in a head wrap, a substantial earring dangling from her remaining ear. The homages range from beautiful to whimsical to surreal, from classical to abstract to steampunk. You’ll see the Lady in images, digital drawings and oil paintings, and re-produced in sculptures designed from embroidery thread, toys, school supplies and multicolored beads and buttons. 

She appears as a toddler, an older bearded male, a duck, a pet dog, a bunny and a blue Na’vi from Avatar.  In additional than a person graphic, she’s decidedly 21st century, sporting a encounter mask or earbuds or holding a cellphone. A single artist overlayed Vermeer’s painting on a Tinder display screen, contacting the generation “Swipe Appropriate.”

Were some of the electronic variations made with an AI art creation resource like Dall-E? You can bet on it. 

The Mauritshuis usually residences the well known portray, but for 8 months setting up in February, the perform will be out on loan for a Vermeer exhibit at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Somewhat than depart the Girl’s wall empty, the Mauritshuis designs to rotate some of the crowdsourced interpretations through a digital display screen.   

“The place exactly where the Girl hangs will temporarily turn into a spot of inspiration with as quite a few Ladies alongside one another as feasible, from property and overseas,” the museum states. 

As the submissions attest, the museum did not area any limits on creativeness right here. “A self-portrait with a bathtub towel as a turban, a painted iron or even a pile of crockery,” it suggests. “Minimal is as well insane for us.” Registration for the contest shut on Jan. 15. 

Vermeer, a single of the most renowned Dutch painters of the 17th century, is identified for his personal domestic scenes and spectacular use of mild.

His iconic Female With a Pearl Earring has designed a variety literary and cinematic appearances, such as in a 1999 historical novel of the exact same title that explained to a fictional tale of the painting’s development. That reserve led to a 2003 film adaptation starring Scarlett Johansson as a youthful servant in the household of Vermeer, played by Colin Firth. 

If you want to examine the original painting in more depth to superior take pleasure in the reimaginings, an augmented-reality characteristic called Pocket Gallery in Google’s free Google Arts & Society app offers a virtual exhibition place where you can see and study about all 36 of Vermeer’s paintings. None of them function robots.