Looking at Mondrian's Victory Boogie-Woogie: What Do I Feel?

Abstract artists use non-figurative elements (i.e. colours, lines, shapes, and textures) to convey emotions and often rely on the titles of their various compositions to generate (or enhance) an emotional reaction in the audience. Several psychological works observed that the metadata (i.e., titles, description and/or artist statements) associated with paintings increase the understanding and the aesthetic appreciation of artworks. In this paper we explore if the same metadata could facilitate the computational analysis of artworks, and reveal what kind of emotional responses they awake. To this end, we employ computer vision and sentiment analysis to learn statistical patterns associated with positive and negative emotions on abstract paintings. We propose a multimodal approach which combines both visual and metadata features in order to improve the machine performance. In particular, we propose a novel joint flexible Schatten p-norm model which can exploit the sharing patterns between visual and textual information for abstract painting emotion analysis. Moreover, we conduct a qualitative analysis on the cases in which metadata help improving the machine performance.