Paintings and computers

There are “dramatically higher similarities between Van Gogh and Pollock than between Van Gogh and painters such as Monet and Renoir, who conventional art criticism would think more closely related to Van Gogh’s oeuvre than Pollock’s is.”  That’s what I read today in the latest The Economist, (July 30th-August 5th, 2011).  Lior Shamir, a computer scientist at Lawrence Technological University, analyzied 57 images by each of the nine painters—Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Vasily Kandinsky, Claude Monet, Jackson Pollock, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Mark Rothko and Vincent van Gogh.  Dr. Shamir has just published his paper in the journal,  Leonardo.