Klimt.

"If there's one film that holds its place on my ever-shifting list of the best films of the last decade, it's Raoul Ruiz's 1999 Time Regained, a brilliantly stylized visualization of the blurred borders between Proust's life, art, and social milieu," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "Klimt, by contrast, feels like a listless grafting of similar strategies... onto an artist whose work was dismissed by many in his day as oversexed, and by some today as eye candy."

"John Malkovich has virtually cornered the market on portraying cold, obsessive aesthetes in the thrall of demonic visions," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "And in Klimt, Raúl Ruiz's lavish biographical fantasia, his depiction of the Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt adds another Mephistophelean figure to his gallery of elegant monsters.... I have not seen the 130-minute director's cut of Klimt that was shown at the 2006 Berlin and Rotterdam film festivals, but I imagine it was structurally more sound than the 97-minute blur of a movie that opens today in New York."

Updated through 10/19.

Earlier: Sharon Mizota talks with Ruiz for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 10/18: "For the cosmetics heir Ronald S Lauder, who drew global attention last year by acquiring a lustrous portrait by Gustav Klimt for $135 million, the exhibition opening today at the Neue Galerie is something of a love fest," writes Robin Pogrebin in the NYT. "The show, Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections, celebrates not only Klimt and his fin-de-siècle milieu in Vienna, but Mr Lauder's fervent passion for acquiring art.... But for some experts in Holocaust restitution research, the show raises another issue related to Mr Lauder's trove: He declines to issue documentation of his private collection for public scrutiny."

Somewhat related: Julia Rothman admires Egon Schiele: Drawings and Watercolors.

Update, 10/19: "Arriving at the Neue Galerie on Monday evening for a screening (in fact, the US premiere, though it could hardly have been less red-carpet) of Klimt..., I noticed that not one but two seats bore the name tags of its star, John Malkovich," writes Michael Wilson in an entry in Artforum's diary. "It was as if my best efforts at suppressing thoughts of Spike Jonze's mischievous fantasy Being John Malkovich (1999) - in which the actor is used and abused in the strangest of ways - were being consciously derailed; sipping my champagne in the tiny basement screening room prior to curtain up, I couldn't help but picture the arrival of multiple Malkoviches, perhaps all squabbling with one another in the manner of Jonze's unnerving restaurant scene. But of course, it was not to be; Malkovich turned up unaccompanied by clones..."

NYT art critic Roberta Smith finds the setting for that premiere "less a coherent Klimt exhibition than a slightly rambling, something-for-everyone Klimt-o-rama. Filling this small museum from top to bottom, it is constantly changing gears, focus and levels of seriousness."

Posted by dwhudson at October 17, 2007 5:36 AM