Prurient Versions

As I said, at work I’m doing a series on “beautiful at any size,” starting with the thin ones and going up to the zaftigs. I have another series of entries I want to do for Pleasure Domes, but in between, I’m going to produce special versions of my work saying what I really think but can’t say for commercial and/or just general decency reasons.
Gustav Klimt is one of these artists that I learned about in college, not because of my art appreciation class, although he was there, but because I had a girlfriend who was super into him. The only thing is, I can’t remember which it was, because the things I remember being said about him are connect with looking at the art, not at her. I can’t even remember whether it was a serious girlfriend or just a casual short-time thing, but I remember that my feelings about Klimt come from this girl.
The secret to Klimt's enduring popularity is his ability to take the internal life of his figures and project it into an external image. Klimt works with bright colors and abstract shapes to create a visual image of the emotional state felt by the people he represents. His most popular image is also his most extreme in this regard. In The Kiss, Klimt reduces his human figures to their absolute minimum, in terms of realistic representation. We see their hands, their faces, a shoulder, some feet, mostly focusing on the areas of intense awareness during the moment of kissing. Oddly, Klimt actually does something similar to porn, which is, I guess, a fundamental characteristic of the male gaze, he almost erases the male figure. The man’s face is hidden, while the woman looks out at us. Oddly, too, although the emotions in the picture are of a passionate, lip-to-lip kiss, the man is actually kissing her on the cheek. Why? Because this frees her lips to be puckered at us, so that we as male viewers can place ourselves in the picture as kissing her, feeling her hands, her shoulder, the warmth of her flesh on our flesh as the two bodies dissolve into warmth that almost interdiffuses.
When Klimt does portray a more complete human figure, as in this detail from Sea Serpents, it is most likely a waify, almost emaciated woman, the sort of person we might mistake for the anorexic actress, and it shows how women with a bad body image can imagine they are overweight even when they are deathly thin. In a body of this size, any amount of fat can look out of proportion, such as the woman's thigh. But Klimt shows us this woman is comfortable, so secure that the strength of her eyes challenges us to enter the roiling sea of her emotion. Her expression really is what makes this picture, it’s a don’t-you-dare expression that also says, dare, dare, dare.
Klimt also shows us in this Portrait of Emile Floge that proportion can be easily maintained with the proper clothing, clothes that give volume and femininity to a slender frame. I love the scarf that gives volume to the neck, the puffy sleeves that make the arms appear more fleshy. Good stuff.