Thursday, May 8, 2008

Gustav Klimt was the modelfucking man





[article from Entertainment Weekly]

BBC Videos seven-disc set “The Private Life of a Masterpiece” reveals the delicious and sometimes tawdry details of those classic masterworks of the past.

For instance Klimt worked wearing his favorite blue robe with nothing on underneath and kept a bevy of barely-clad redheads milling about to service any “pressing” needs when painting all those details wearied him. As another respite he also sketched the girls and by the time he finished The Kiss (1908) he had a collection of over 100 nudes.

In 1924 the National Gallery of London bought the seventh and most famous version of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers(1888) for 1,325 (British) and have subsequently made over 2 million just on Sunflowers-themed postcards and tea towels. If I remember correctly the anime Samurai Champloo did an entire episode around Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (the main characters were after all searching for someone named the Sunflower Samurai after all).

Edvard Munch: The lettering in the sky on Munch’s The Scream reads in Norwegian “This can only have been painted by a madman.” Scholars have no idea whether Munch wrote this himself or it was scratched in by one of his detractors. Regardless Munch went on to create 105 versions of The Scream (which I think answers all questions about his mental state).

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