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I am a painter with work at MoMA and the Met. I just published 50 years of my work as an open AI dataset. Here is what I learned.

March 23, 2026
•Artificial intelligence

Here’s something that really caught my attention — an artist with work in MoMA and the Met just released 50 years of his paintings as an open AI dataset. And get this — within a week, it’s been downloaded over 2,500 times. ((slower)) Now, here’s where it gets interesting. According to /u/hafftka, a painter who’s dedicated decades to capturing the human figure, he wanted his work to have a future — one shaped by AI. So he shared his entire catalog on Hugging Face, with thousands of images and rich metadata, licensing it openly. What surprised him? How quickly the research community engaged. But what’s more profound — he says his paintings and the questions they raise haven’t changed: What does it mean to look at the human body? What does the machine see that we don’t? And perhaps most important — what can AI reveal about human perception? Honestly, /u/hafftka just wants to hear what people do with this. It’s a fascinating bridge between art, technology, and those age-old questions about seeing and understanding.

I am a painter with work at MoMA and the Met. I just published 50 years of my work as an open AI dataset. Here is what I learned.

I have been making figurative art since the 1970s. Oil on canvas, works on paper, drawings, etchings, lithographs, and more recently digital works. My paintings are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, SFMOMA, and the British Museum.

Earlier this month I published my entire catalog raisonne as an open dataset on Hugging Face. Roughly 3,000 to 4,000 documented works with full metadata, CC-BY-NC-4.0 licensed. My total output is about double that and I will keep adding to it.

In one week the dataset has had over 2,500 downloads.

I am not a developer or a researcher. I am an artist who has spent fifty years painting the human figure. I did this because I want my work to have a future and the future involves AI. I would rather engage with that on my own terms than wait for it to happen to me.

What surprised me is how quickly the research community found it and engaged with it. What did not surprise me is that the questions the dataset raises are the same questions my paintings have always asked. What does it mean to look at the human body? What does the machine see that the human does not? What does the human see that the machine cannot?

I do not have answers. I have fifty years of looking.

If you have downloaded it or are thinking about it I would genuinely like to hear what you are doing with it.

Dataset: huggingface.co/datasets/Hafftka/michael-hafftka-catalog-raisonne

submitted by /u/hafftka
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Audio Transcript

I am a painter with work at MoMA and the Met. I just published 50 years of my work as an open AI dataset. Here is what I learned.

I have been making figurative art since the 1970s. Oil on canvas, works on paper, drawings, etchings, lithographs, and more recently digital works. My paintings are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, SFMOMA, and the British Museum.

Earlier this month I published my entire catalog raisonne as an open dataset on Hugging Face. Roughly 3,000 to 4,000 documented works with full metadata, CC-BY-NC-4.0 licensed. My total output is about double that and I will keep adding to it.

In one week the dataset has had over 2,500 downloads.

I am not a developer or a researcher. I am an artist who has spent fifty years painting the human figure. I did this because I want my work to have a future and the future involves AI. I would rather engage with that on my own terms than wait for it to happen to me.

What surprised me is how quickly the research community found it and engaged with it. What did not surprise me is that the questions the dataset raises are the same questions my paintings have always asked. What does it mean to look at the human body? What does the machine see that the human does not? What does the human see that the machine cannot?

I do not have answers. I have fifty years of looking.

If you have downloaded it or are thinking about it I would genuinely like to hear what you are doing with it.

Dataset: huggingface.co/datasets/Hafftka/michael-hafftka-catalog-raisonne

submitted by /u/hafftka
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