According to Gustav Klimt, "all art is erotic". As a man and a painter, Klimt was highly attuned to the sensual and found eroticism everywhere: in women, both as subjects and as lovers (he had many); in nature – the beech trees and water of the Attersee lake in upper Austria; and in clothes, where he relished pattern, line and colour (gold especially). Few artists were less interested in the everyday than Klimt.
The painter's obsession with clothes has now come full circle as Turnbull & Asser has taken his work as inspiration for a smoking jacket and tie in its new The Artist and The Architect collection. The London clothier has always used colour and pattern in bold and original ways; the Klimt-inspired smoking jacket continues this elegant tradition. It is an elegant mosaic of scarlet, mustard, rusty orange and dark navy that is reminiscent of the artist's most famous works, including The Kiss and his paintings of Adele Bloch-Bauer, a society hostess he painted twice as a wan creature, a Byzantine icon, a face atop a glittering swirl of gold, a mixture of the real and the abstract. It is unclear what attracted him more – the flesh-and-blood figure of Adele and other women or the luxury of their clothes and surroundings.
In fact much of Klimt's work was concerned with the flexuous, erotic, and cherished images of women. The painter was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, a fellow resident of Vienna, and his paintings of women are full of the unconscious – femmes fatales, yearning and worship. Klimt himself was a supplicant: he liked to wander around in a full-length smock, beneath which he was naked, and his fascination with women was insatiable – on his deathbed, he was facing no fewer than 14 paternity suits.
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Klimt started his career as a conservative painter of murals in late 19th-century Vienna, and soon became a figurehead for the city's avant-garde. His paintings have an Art Nouveau sinuousness to them, which didn't always go down well. In 1894, he was commissioned to paint figures representing Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence for the University of Vienna, but when unveiled, they were condemned as pornographic.
Since he couldn't help himself, he stopped trying to hold back. He gave up public commissions largely to paint portraits of the women who were fascinated by him, in turn. And among them was the Bloch-Bauer, whose portraits are among the 30 most expensive pictures ever sold (at $135m and $88m).
With The Artist and The Architect collection, Turnbull & Asser has started a campaign against the mundane and for this, Klimt is the perfect inspirational figure. The painter's way of finding pattern in everything and showing textiles as though they were made of mosaic works perfectly for such items as smoking jackets and ties. There was also nothing of the mundane about the artist, or his work.
MICHAEL PRODGER is a former Sunday Telegraph literary editor and now writes about art and culture for The Guardian and New Statesman
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