So ubiquitous is the style and imagery of Gustav Klimt that it reaches into bizarre corners of pop culture: the kids animation Mia and Me borrows unashamedly from Klimt’s whorls and rectangles, and of course there’s that episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where the undead steal posters of The Kiss from hapless college students. This, partly, is what makes Klimt a blockbuster figure in contemporary art culture; the eye-watering auction prices his work commands is another factor.
Hence the unusual direction of the newest offering in the Exhibition on Screen strand; as opposed to the customary approach of focusing on a specific show or oeuvre, here the subject is a deep dive into Klimt’s celebrated poster favourite which – inevitably – opens out into a wider examination of the artist’s obsessions and influences.
Familiar as the image is, there are new things to find out about The Kiss: I’d never noticed, for example, that the entwined lovers are standing on the edge of a precipice. The film also makes the point, late on, that as radical as the image may appear, Klimt was far from cutting-edge in the wider stream of modern art; first exhibited in 1908, The Kiss’s contemporaries included the considerably more foundational Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Picasso (1907) and Matisse’s La Danse (1909).
Having said that, there’s plenty here about the swirl of Klimt’s interests – from Byzantine icon-painting, which prompted the distinctive gold leaf patterning used to such advantage in dozens of paintings, to the potent imagery of art nouveau and symbolism that formed a key part of the style of the Vienna Secession. Knowledgable art historians are on hand to explicate all of this; though if the film has a weakness it is a certain curatorial dryness in discussing Klimt’s undisguised eroticism and – make no bones about it – his undeniable sleaziness. Klimt may or may not be experiencing the cancellation brickbats currently being aimed at Picasso, but you wonder if something may erupt further down the line.
• Klimt & The Kiss is released on 30 October in UK cinemas.
