CISRA Puzzle Competition 2011 - Solutions

2D. Art Heist

The first step is to identify all of the art works from the line drawings.

• The Raft of the Medusa – Théodore Géricault
• Nighthawks – Edward Hopper
• Composition A: Composition with Black, Red, Gray, Yellow, and Blue – Piet Mondrian
• Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist's Mother – James McNeill Whistler
• Sunflowers, 3rd version – Vincent van Gogh
• American Gothic – Grant Wood
• The Birth of Venus – Sandro Botticelli
• Mona Lisa – Leonardo da Vinci
• The Scream – Edvard Munch
• The Persistence of Memory – Salvador Dali
• The Great Wave off Kanagawa – Katsushika Hokusai
• Whaam! – Roy Lichtenstein
• Three Musicians – Pablo Picasso
• Dance Class at the Opera, rue Le Peletier – Edgar Degas
• The Creation of Adam – Michelangelo
• The Treachery of Images – Rene Magritte
• The Starry Night – Vincent van Gogh
• A Friend in Need – Cassius Marcellus Coolidge
• The Fighting Temerairetugged to her last Berth to be broken up, 1838 – J.M.W. Turner
• Girl with a Pearl Earring – Johannes Vermeer
• The Cricketers – Russell Drysdale
• Blue Poles – Jackson Pollock

Selecting the indicated squares from each artwork and arranging them into a grid produces an image resembling a pixelated version of Sidney Nolan's iconic painting Ned Kelly, which is on display in the Australian National Gallery (along with Blue Poles and The Cricketers).

The answer to the puzzle is NED KELLY.

Puzzle design notes:

Exactly what mosaic you get out at the end depends on a few factors: how careful you are at picking the colour swatches out of the original paintings; what versions of the painting images you use (the various copies of these paintings that can be seen on Internet sites often contain different colour balances); and whether you try to copy the colour swatches faithfully, or simply identify them broadly as "yellow" or "brown" or "blue", etc. Doing the latter can actually lead to a slightly better representation than the one shown here.

We had to pick an image that could stand pixelisation to this coarse a resolution, as well as slight inaccuracies in colour swatches, and still be iconic enough to be recognisable.