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Lego’s latest art set is a literal masterpiece with Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss
Rather than spaceships or race cars the latest Lego set for adults is the biggest entry yet in their Art Masterpiece line, featuring the work of Gustav Klimt.
The modern popularity of Lego is not due to it just appealing to kids or even to adults obsessed with pop culture franchises like Star Wars and Harry Potter. In recent years it’s been because Lego make sets based on all kinds of things, from the Botanicals range to footballers.
One of their more unexpected themes has been recreations of famous art, including iconic works such as Keith Haring’s Dancing Figures, the Mona Lisa, Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and Claude Monet’s Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies.
All of the sets are made using ordinary Lego pieces and that means they all have a 3D effect too, where the image sticks some way out from the (brick-built) canvas. It feels like it shouldn’t work but they all look surprisingly good and this new one, featuring Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, might be the best yet.
The Kiss, originally called The Lovers, is an oil-on-canvas painting with gold leaf, silver, and platinum that was painted sometime around 1907, by Austrian Symbolist Gustav Klimt.
It features a man and a woman (possibly Orpheus and Eurydice from Greek myth) embracing, while wearing expensive-looking robes inspired by the Art Nouveau movement.
The painting is one of the most famous of the 20th century and really not the sort of thing you’d expect to see made out of Lego, especially not with all the gold and other precious metals.
As a result, it’s the biggest Art set so far and made up of 4,000 individual pieces. Inevitably, it’s the most expensive too, at £269.99, but it is kind of shocking how realistic it looks – especially from a distance.
Look closer and you can see how the effect was pulled off, with things like gold coloured coiled whips used for some of the circular shapes and a complex mix of rectangles and very small squares and quarter-circles.
The set was created in conjunction with the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, where the original painting is permanently displayed, and there’s a special podcast featuring the Lego designer and museum curator Stephanie Auer that will be available from August 1 on Lego.com, Spotify, and YouTube.
The set (#31221) will be released on August 4, via the Lego website and retail stores, but if you’re a Lego Insider (which requires only a free sign-up) you can get it from August 1.
The complete model measures 60cm by 54cm when finished and is 4cm deep. Like most of the Art Masterpiece range you can also hang it from the wall, like a regular painting, via a special Lego piece on the back.
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