Artist Michael Hafftka, whose work is held in collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, SFMOMA, and the British Museum, has published his entire catalog raisonné as an open dataset on Hugging Face. The dataset contains roughly 3,000 to 4,000 documented works spanning five decades of figurative art, released under a CC-BY-NC-4.0 license.
Hafftka has been creating figurative art since the 1970s, working across oil on canvas, works on paper, drawings, etchings, lithographs, and digital works. His total artistic output is approximately double the number of works included in the dataset, with plans to continue adding pieces over time.
The dataset received over 2,500 downloads within one week of its release earlier this month. Hafftka noted the rapid engagement from the research community, stating in a Reddit post: “What surprised me is how quickly the research community found it and engaged with it.”
The artist explained his motivation for the release: “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.” Hafftka, who describes himself as neither a developer nor researcher but “an artist who has spent fifty years painting the human figure,” sees the dataset as raising fundamental questions about perception and representation.
According to Hafftka, the dataset poses the same questions his paintings have always explored: “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?” He acknowledged having no definitive answers, stating: “I do not have answers. I have fifty years of looking.”
