Who remembers Klimt? Directed by literary experimenter Raul Ruiz, the 2006 film starred Saffron Burrows, Stephen Dillane and a sphinxlike John Malkovich as the bearded Viennese rebel who slinked from studio to salon to sexual adventure. The movie couldn’t find a commercial distributor, even as Klimt-omaniac Ronald S. Lauder made headlines with his $135 million purchase of the artist’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I.

When the well-named Outsider Pictures finally opened the film in U.S. theaters last summer, Klimt couldn’t find an audience, either. It made all of $97,656 domestically and just $573,367 worldwide. Fewer than 10,000 people in the States saw it—a dismal number for a museum exhibition, let alone a movie. The U.S. gross wouldn’t buy the lowliest of Klimt drawings.

Movies about art and artists generally attract small audiences; notable exceptions include epics in which huge stars play tortured giants (Kirk Douglas’s turn as Vincent van Gogh in Lust for Life, 1956, or Charlton Heston as Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy, 1965). So despite stories rich in melodrama, no recent artist biopic has become a blockbuster. Factory Girl, a portrait of Andy Warhol groupie Edie Sedgwick starring Sienna Miller as Edie and Guy Pearce as Warhol, is the latest shipwreck. Despite prerelease hype and last-minute reediting, it earned only $3.1 million, much less than it cost to make.

I Shot Andy Warhol (1997), with Lili Taylor as Valerie Solanas, Warhol’s would-be assassin, managed to turn a profit on a nearly $1.9 million domestic take. The most profitable recent film about an artist was Frida, Julie Taymor’s musical biopic about Mexican surrealist Frida Kahlo with that perennial art theme: martyrdom. “Feminists were always looking for a Vincent van Gogh figure, and with Frida Kahlo, they finally found one,” William S. Lieberman, the late Metropolitan Museum of Art curator, liked to say. The curvaceous Salma Hayek as the skeletal Kahlo helped move the $12 million film beyond the narrow art audience, and it took in $56 million worldwide.

Martyrdom with dream-team stars was the strategy of Pollock, the 2000 Ab-Ex saga starring and directed by Ed Harris and produced by art collector Peter Brant. The film featured Val Kilmer as Willem de Kooning, Marcia Gay Harden as Lee Krasner, Jennifer Connelly as Pollock’s mistress Ruth Kligman and Brant’s wife, model Stephanie Seymour, as Helen Frankenthaler.

It grossed $10.5 million. Brant began producing movies with Basquiat, Julian Schnabel’s 1996 directorial debut. Schnabel got final cut, and the film took in just $3 million, but that was in the era before a Basquiat painting sold for that much. Its impact, however, surpassed its earnings, launching Pollock and other art biopics—not all of them good.

Surviving Picasso, also released in 1996, with Anthony Hopkins as the Spanish master in wartime Paris, cost $16 million to make and grossed $2 million in the U.S. You might call the audience’s reaction the silence of the lambs. Modigliani, a 2004 martyrology that substituted Bucharest for Paris and cast a chubby Andy Garcia as the starving artist, flopped, taking in just $200,000 in the U.S. but earning another $1.2 million internationally. Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, starring Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey Jr., cost $14 million and grossed $2.2 million worldwide. “It wasn’t the film that [Arbus’s] fans expected,” says the movie’s distributor, Bob Berney.

Not even the feminist angle that helped Frida is a sure bet. Artemisia, the French bodice ripper about Orazio Gentileschi’s daughter, the leading woman artist of her time (1593–1653) despite being raped by her painting teacher, Agostino Tassi, grossed only $356,000 in the U.S. in 1998. Love Is the Devil (1998), in which Derek Jacobi plays a nasty, abusive Francis Bacon with a young, pre-Bond Daniel Craig as his lover, George Dyer, also proved that art shock doesn’t always sell.

The ultimate artist-monster, Adolf Hitler, was the subject of Max (2002), which portrayed a young Hitler as tortured painter—before his career change—as seen through the eyes of his postwar dealer, played by John Cusack. Max was almost as preposterous as Mel Brooks’s famous Führer farce, just a lot less less funny and much less profitable.