Original subtitles

WIEBER: You're just bedazzled, initially.

You're disoriented.

You don't quite understand what's going on.

So you have to exhale,

take a breath, and just look at the work and be with it,

and then, almost as you are looking through it,

it starts to make sense.

The massive field of gold

and shimmering gives way to the colours of the flowers.

And then, you actually start noticing, "Oh, there's a hand,

and there's a face, and there's a neck."

So what I love about encountering the work is

that time it demands from you

to decipher it,

to understand what is actually going on.

And I think that is just so exciting.

(RISTIC SPEAKS IN GERMAN)

(SMOLA SPEAKS IN GERMAN)

RAMIREZ: He lived with his mother and his sisters in a sense of a kind

of rural isolation, almost like a hermit.

But at the same time, Viennese society was seeking him out.

He was requested as the portraitist

of some of the good and the greats.

The Kiss could only have been made when it was,

where it was, by whom it was.

It is so uniquely Viennese,

so uniquely turn of the century.

It embodies so much

of that vibrant city at the time

and rejects so much

of what painting conventionally had done before.

PLUMLEY: Vienna 1900 is such a beguiling period.

It's glamorous.

There are waltzes; there are emperors.

There are rank upon rank of military uniforms.

It is an utterly splendid place

that the Habsburgs were so consummate at creating.

But I think the reason it's so beguiling is

because that is a veneer. And it's a veneer that,

particularly at this point in time, begins to crack.

There's huge numbers of immigrants coming into the city,

lower working class that are barely making ends meet.

The housing situation is absolutely horrendous.

Food shortages, disease,

the rising anti-Semitism.

The darker side of Vienna

is always lurking in the background.

(TRETTER SPEAKS IN GERMAN)

(BISANZ-PRAKKEN SPEAKS IN GERMAN)

The School of Applied Arts was very much rooted in principles

that we would associate with Britain

and the Victorians

and figures like John Ruskin and William Morris.

The idea of taking various different artistic disciplines,

as well as painting,

and applying those to greater social ends.

And so those are the principles

that Klimt would have been aware of as a student.

It was all with the idea that you weren't just going to leave

and become yet another portraitist, yet another landscape painter,

but really think how YOUR work...

could better society and better the world.

PLUMLEY: Klimt was coming of age at a period of great change in Vienna.

It was an era dominated by the construction of the Ringstrasse,

the replacement of the old medieval walls

that had surrounded the centre of power

for over six hundred years by this point in time,

and replaced it with this very grand avenue.

You'll find Parliament, stock exchange,

opera house, concert halls, museums...

..and it made Vienna

the grandest it had ever been.

This amazing range of grand municipal buildings...

..wasn't only a real showcase for the architects of the age,

it was also a kind of canvas

for the artists of the time too.

(BAROQUE-STYLE ORCHESTRAL MUSIC)

(SOFT ORCHESTRAL MUSIC)

Gustav Klimt, and his brother Ernst Klimt,

and a fellow student at the School of Applied Arts, Franz Matsch,

take on commissions for the Ringstrasse,

and they include the interiors of the Burgtheater, the Court Theatre,

the major playhouse on the Ring,

as well as the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

And these are murals

of epic proportions.

In the Court Theatre, they detail the history of drama

from the ancient world right up to the modern period.

Wonderful images of Shakespeare's Globe,

all detailed in this sweeping epic

and actually quite specific academic style by Klimt,

something that we wouldn't immediately associate

with the gold and the eroticism of the later period.

But these are the very works, of course,

that make him a household name.

These are the things that secure his fame,

and, indeed, to some extent, his fortune.

(SOFT, MELODIC STRING MUSIC)

(SMOLA SPEAKS IN GERMAN)

RAMIREZ: Although The Kiss was painted in 1907, 1908,

the evolution to get Klimt

to that point began a decade earlier.

What Klimt and a lot of the artists at the turn of the 20th century

were doing was rejecting the sort of academy style,

the very formal training,

hyper realism of the art of the past,

and leaning into something that is more about style,

about decoration, about the essence of things.

There are many elements of The Kiss which reflect the Jugendstil,

the Art Nouveau movement in Vienna.

It is, of course,

a celebration of nature, in many ways,

with the flowers, with the leaves, with the tendrils

that wrap their way around the lover's body.

Art Nouveau became known as Jugendstil, "The Style of Youth."

And, in that youthfulness,

it is, of course, a rejection of history of the ancient.

It is very much an art rooted in the natural,

away from centres of industry,

away from the urban, and out in the natural world

with its glorious organic lines,

the curvilinear, the fluid,

and, of course, the human body.

And The Kiss in 1907 really marks

the culmination of a decade

of the birth of Modernism in Vienna...

..because, in 1897,

a group of artists who aren't necessarily unified

by one style form a new union of Austrian artists

which had this name of The Secession,

with Gustav Klimt as its founding president.

The Secession is quite a literal movement

in the sense, it is a secession, a seceding,

a breaking away from something,

and it's following very much in the footsteps

of other secessions in Europe.

This is a moment in art

that's taking different manifestations

depending on whereabouts in Europe you are.

So, in France, we see the rise of the Impressionists.

In Britain, we see the rise of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

What Klimt is doing, and what the other Secessionists are doing,

they're saying, "We're going to create total immersive art,

art that is paint, mural,

architecture, gold,

different mediums,

and we are going to use it to express essential human truths."

(SOFT STRING MUSIC)

The Secession is not just an intellectual idea

or a metaphorical idea.

It actually took concrete form

in a wonderful temple to the arts,

designed by a very young architect called Joseph Olbrich.

It is very much a rejection of the heavy facades,

the monumental epic style of The Ringstrasse.

It also announces above the door their great slogan:

"To every age, its art, and to art, its freedom."

(RISTIC SPEAKS IN GERMAN)

(SPEAKS IN GERMAN)

(JAHN SPEAKS IN GERMAN)

When you say the word Klimt, you immediately hear gold,

or rather, you see gold.

You're dazzled by it.

And The Kiss was created

at what many people have called the height of the golden period,

the period of both this painting

and his very famous portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer,

"The Woman In Gold," as she's become known.

WIEBER: So in his golden phase,

Klimt was really thinking through the relationship

between a three dimensional space

as we know it in painting.

Think about the Renaissance, for example:

you as a viewer are looking at a painting,

and the painting is almost

a continuation of your own space.

You could, in theory, almost step into that space.

Klimt is not interested in that at all.

He is interested in two-dimensional spaces.

He's flattening the space.

What he is interested in is layers of planes.

And, in Adele Bloch-Bauer,

I think you see it beautifully

because, again, it is one of those works

where you look at it, and it takes you a while to orient yourself

and to understand what is actually going on.

Is she sitting?

Is she standing? What's her dress?

So all that's really recognisable are her hands...

and her face.

Her beautiful face with these gorgeous red lips,

the slightly flushed cheeks,

and her porcelain-coloured skin.

The rest is just, on first sight, this big sort of...

beautiful, shiny array

of different shapes

and textures and surfaces.

So that is really what the Golden Phase is about.

He's flattening the picture space.

He is thinking about painting

as an object in and of itself

that functions as a decorative object in a room.

But it's not just Klimt, of course,

because gold is apparent within the works

of associate members of the Secession movement.

But what it is for all of them is, as it were, raising the stakes...

..to use something so precious is

like Byzantine cultures or the Greek Orthodox Church,

to raise something to the level of an icon.

And really what we have in The Kiss...

is an icon for an age.

(BISANZ-PRAKKEN SPEAKS IN GERMAN)

(SPEAKS IN GERMAN)

BADE: The fact was that women liked him, and he liked women.

We know that there were, I think,

was it 12 or 14 claims of paternity after he died?

He had very casual sex with his models,

but also apparently with the high society ladies that he portrayed.

(SPEAKS IN GERMAN)

Portraiture is a key genre

in Vienna at the time.

The generation following Klimt - the Schieles and the Kokoschkas -

they're still experimenting

within the genre of the portrait:

the self-portrait and the portrait.

So I think artistic innovation,

and creative drive,

and this move towards an Avant-Garde language happens

within portraiture in Vienna,

which is quite unique and also quite exciting.

So, for Klimt, he has to earn a living, right?

He's an artist, so he takes on portraiture,

probably, initially, for his bread and butter.

He is quite well connected

in both the artistic, progressive circles in Vienna,

but he's also moving in this Jewish,

upper middle-class bourgeoisie

who want either their wives or their daughters

to be portrayed by Gustav Klimt.

That is ultimately becoming the main income source.

(AUER SPEAKS IN GERMAN)

(SPEAKS IN GERMAN)

(FELLINGER CONTINUES SPEAKING GERMAN)

WIEBER: When works like Waters Snakes were exhibited,

they were problematic.

Klimt throughout his career was accused of pornography

because of the way in which he showed

the both female and male body

in all of its corporal realities.

PLUMLEY: Sexually, Vienna 1900 is a contradictory place.

Sex is everywhere.

We see this very strange tension

between buttoned up, corseted women -

trophy brides, we would probably call them today...

..and actually very urgent,

quite feral impulses making their way

through the art and literature and the music of the time.

Klimt certainly had no problem forming relationships with women

that we're never quite sure

whether he sees the figures he's painting

as an object of affection,

as an object of attraction,

or as the demonic femme fatale,

who will, like the praying mantis, destroy him after sexual congress.

For me, The Kiss is a bittersweet image.

It may appear to be a chaste image,

but it's not really as romantic as so many people make it out to be -

all those students who had it on their bedroom wall.

I think there are more urgent sexual impulses lurking

beneath that glittering surface.

When I kiss someone that I love,

I don't put my hands around their throat,

and I don't expect them to claw my hands away.

There is something weirdly violent about this image.

And there's something really tense

between this quite hulking,

great masculine presence over this woman

and her rather frail and fragile form.

And that is a very strange tension

to find in this supposedly celebratory work of art.

(SMOLA SPEAKS IN GERMAN)

In 1908,

there was a big retrospective of Klimt's work at the Kunstschau,

and that's when The Kiss was first publicly exhibited.

Other works that were in that exhibition were, for example,

The Three Ages Of Woman

which speaks to a preoccupation of Klimt

throughout his career with the cycle of life.

He doesn't shy away from really showing

the physical traces of old age.

How does time as it passes

manifest itself in the human body?

I think that's a very interesting juxtaposition to The Kiss

in terms of the physical proximity during the Kunstschau.

Because The Kiss is so much about these two individuals

being in the prime of their lives,

so it's a very life-affirming painting.

And The Three Ages Of Woman, I think,

when you look at the young woman and the child,

you can make similar observations about it

in terms of it being very life-affirming.

But always looming in the background is

it's all going to come to an end.

Death hangs heavy over his work.

So when, on the 6th of February 1918

he succumbed to a stroke,

I think the idea

that his death was part of this...

this time of war, of great loss,

kind of concludes his story perfectly.

(SPEAKS IN GERMAN)

When a painting like The Kiss becomes

so present within the mind's eye,

so reproduced, so familiar...

..it also, of course, gets associated not with Kunst,

with art, but with Kitsch.

And anything that has gold in it

can look a little gaudy,

look a little trivial, in fact, despite how precious it is.

But I think Klimt,

for all the glitter of it,

for all the glamour of it,

and for all the headline-grabbing prices

that are paid for these paintings,

actually, he is a great artist.

He was an exceptional draughtsman

who fundamentally understood human anatomy

and knew the human body,

knew it just as well as Michelangelo or Caravaggio.

(RISTIC SPEAKS IN GERMAN)

The themes that he engages with

remain the same throughout his career.

It's how he clothes them, or packages them,

or how he's trying to bring his message across changes.

I think that makes him such a fantastic artist.

He's constantly challenging himself.

What Klimt imbues his work with is...

that real force...

that we all have to confront when we are looking at works of art.

They are still, and they are dead.

And death is so present within Klimt's work.

Death was around him and goodness knows

we know what is coming at the end of his life in 1914 to 1918

and indeed, his own death.

And I think Klimt engages with that...

..which means that it's not kitsch,

because kitsch is just throwaway.

Art endures.

Don't be blinded by the beauty.

Get to know the complete range of Klimt's work.

Get to know...

how he really engages with human forces:

of life and death,

and hope and dismay...

..and all of those things

that are everyday but are also eternal.