The Curious AI Case of a Kirchner Painting in Limbo

Artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly visible – and polarising – tool in artwork authentication. Over the last decade, several companies have developed systems that they claim can identify an artist’s hand using digital images with unerring accuracy. But adoption of the technology also raises existential questions for art experts. For example, how should AI results be weighed against provenance research, technical examination and good old human judgement?

While the market continues to be wary of solely relying on AI authentication, some players have adopted its use. For example, last year Zürich’s Germann Auction House partnered with Switzerland-based AI authentication company Art Recognition to authenticate a watercolour by Russian artist Marianne von Werefkin. It ended up selling for just under US$17,000, almost double its high estimate of $9,000.
Sidler, an auctioneer at Germann Auction House told ARTnews last year that he wouldn’t be surprised if there are “critical voices” about only relying on AI to authenticate the artwork. “However, I expect an overall positive reception of the news that we are embracing the groundbreaking method of Art Recognition,” he added.

 Industry watchers believe that AI authentication must be complemented with expert knowledge and provenance research. “Any company using AI to fully attribute a painting should be treated with serious doubt,” Simon Gillespie, who runs an art authentication and restoration studio in London, previously told me. Carina Popovici, Art Recognition’s CEO, is on the same page. “I strongly believe that the future of art authentication lies in the collaboration between AI and experts,” she says.

 A more recent case involving Art Recognition and a disputed Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painting has shed further light on AI’s role in the art market.

 Katze in Blumenwiese was sold in 1980 by a Swiss gallery as a work by the Swiss artist Albert Müller. The painting had come from the estate of Kirchner, the German Expressionist painter, and bears an estate stamp. A handwritten note by Roman N. Ketterer, who administered Kirchner’s estate, states: ‘nicht von E.L. Kirchner’ (‘not by E.L. Kirchner’).

 However, the attribution to Müller didn’t stick. In 1981 art historian Beat Stutzer excluded the painting from his catalogue raisonné of Müller’s work. Over the following decades, a number of specialists came to support an attribution to Kirchner.

In 2008 the Swiss Institute for Art History (SIK) in Zürich held a symposium specifically devoted to the painting. Around a dozen experts in art history and the natural sciences took part, and a clear majority supported an attribution to Kirchner. Among them was Eberhard W. Kornfeld, the influential Swiss auctioneer, dealer and Kirchner specialist.

But Wolfgang Henze, the leading expert associated with the Kirchner Archive, remained unconvinced. According to a 2025 account of the case by Swiss art lawyer Andreas Ritter, SIK restorers who examined the painting in 2008 found differences in its brushwork compared with paintings securely attributed to Kirchner. Henze continued to investigate the work’s provenance and documentation and to compare it with paintings by artists associated with Kirchner.

 The painting consequently remained outside the Kirchner catalogue raisonné.

 Art Recognition became involved in 2022. Popovici tells The Art Journal that she knew nothing about the painting’s history when she received the work.

 “For us it was just a painting to analyse like any other,” she says. Her company’s AI system, trained on authenticated Kirchner works, returned a 97.3 percent probability that the painting was authentic, according to Popovici. She says Art Recognition conducted no further examination after delivering the result.

 Swiss gallery Galerie WOS presented it at Art Karlsruhe in Germany in February 2026. The gallery didn’t respond to any of my questions, so it’s unclear if the work was offered for sale or sold at the fair.

However, in an email seen by The Art Journal, Claudius Ochsner, WOS’s director, informed Popovici that the gallery had received the Kirchner Archive’s report, which recognises Katze in Blumenwiese as an authentic Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

When contacted by The Art Journal, the Kirchner Archive said the decision to authenticate the painting followed Art Recognition’s analysis, and that the archive had conducted additional, unspecified examinations on top of the AI authentication.

The change in fate of this painting – from what many human specialists considered a ‘fake’ to becoming a ‘real’ one, bolstered by AI analysis –  doesn’t quite show that AI can replace art experts. In this case, the technology did not operate independently of the established authentication system. Instead, an AI-generated probability entered a case that had already been examined by specialists and was subsequently considered as part of further research by the artist’s archive.

For Popovici, the significance of the result lies in the difference between the AI analysis and the expert opinions that preceded it. 

“The 2008 symposium produced a great deal of expert opinion, and it did not move the case,” she says. “Adding a 13th or 14th specialist to that room would probably not have moved it either, because it would have been essentially the same kind of evidence.”

Art Recognition’s analysis, she adds, provided a different form of evidence: a data-driven assessment produced through a documented and repeatable method.

 “Our model was trained on authenticated works by Kirchner and returned a 97.3 percent probability that the painting is authentic,” Popovici says.

 The archive’s decision, however, was not based on that number alone. Its description of the AI result as ‘one part’ of a much larger investigation leaves open what the other parts were and how they were weighed.

 That is also what distinguishes the Kirchner case from examples in which AI has been used as the sole authentication method. Here, the technology entered an existing dispute and was followed by further examination before an established attribution authority changed its position.

 The 2026 Art Karlsruhe magazine describes Katze in Blumenwiese as ‘a verified/authenticated work made by [Kirchner’s] own hand’ and states that it is to be included in the artist’s new catalogue raisonné.