Klimt's The Kiss, rebuilt in LEGO — and it is the biggest one yet

Gustav Klimt's The Kiss has hung in the Belvedere in Vienna since 1908, and it is the reason a good share of the museum's visitors come at all. Now it exists in a second, smaller, blockier form: the largest LEGO Art Masterpiece to date, developed by the LEGO Group together with the Belvedere.

Translating Klimt into plastic bricks is a stranger problem than it sounds. The painting's gold is not flat: it is leaf, applied in fields of spirals, rectangles and coils, and its shimmer is precisely what a photograph — or a brick — struggles to hold. The model was developed by Master Model Designer Milan Madge with Belvedere curator Stephanie Auer, and presented with general director Stella Rollig and managing director Wolfgang Bergmann.

There is an argument to be had about museums and merchandise, and this project will not settle it. But it does something the Belvedere has been doing well for years: taking a painting that risks becoming wallpaper through sheer familiarity and making people look at it again — this time by asking how it is actually built.

Worth knowing if you go: the real thing is in the Upper Belvedere, and it is smaller than most visitors expect at 180 × 180 cm.

Practical: Upper Belvedere, Prinz-Eugen-Straße 27, Vienna.

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Photos: Belvedere — photo Ouriel Morgensztern / Belvedere, Vienna