Artists’ bodies of work are like icebergs: We almost never see more than the 10% sticking above the water. For Edvard Munch, that means most folks are familiar with The Scream, and maybe a dozen or so of his other 1,800+ paintings, but the rest remain unseen. How much can we really know about an artist by seeing only a handful of his works? If you only saw The Scream you might think all of Munch's paintings were of genderless zombies doing Macaulay Culkin impressions, as I did. But as we will see, this is far from the case.

We put all of Edvard Munch's paintings into a searchable online database so that art lovers can get the added context of seeing all of Munch's paintings, the entire iceberg, not just what shows above water.

In this blog, post we share our experience using machine learning to tag objects within the paintings in an attempt to expand search capabilities beyond traditional metadata like title, dimensions, materials, etc.

What Should We Search For?

To help us decide which features we should search for within the paintings, we created a word cloud using the titles of Munch’s 1800+ paintings to see if it would bring out any key themes.