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Died on 06 February 1918: Gustav
Klimt, Austrian Art
Nouveau painter and draftsman born on 14 July 1862.
— Klimt was the son of an Austrian jeweler. From the age of fourteen
to twenty he studied at the School of Plastic Art in Vienna. From the age
of eighteen, he, his brother Ernst and Franz Matsch undertook commissions
for decorative works. In 1897 he became the first President of the Vienna
Sezession. Influenced first by Makart, he turned away from him after a trip
to Vienna where he discovered Byzantine mosaics. In 1912, he withdrew from
the Sezession and became President of the Austrian National Union of Artists.
In 1917, he was granted an honorary professorship at the Viennese Academy.
From his early works, Klimt caused uproar.
His works were frequently taken down; the Nazis burnt some of them. His
technique is fairly classical, but his subjects were scandalous; naked girls
mingle with skeletons, sexuality expressed in all its forms. Ornament is
all-pervasive in his work; from this background the bodies struggle to the
surface. He was witness to the decadence of an entire society and the fantastic
world that his paintings occupy testify to this by their collection of sex
and death, while the audacity and freedom of his graphic style foreshadow
modern art.
— A leading exponent of Art Nouveau, Klimt is considered one of the
greatest decorative painters of the 20th century. His depictions of the
femme fatale and his drawings treating the theme of female sexuality have
assured him a place in the history of erotic art. He is remembered for his
role in the formation of the Vienna Secession, the radical group of Austrian
artists of which he became the first president in 1897, and also for the
frequent scandals and protests that marked his later career. These contrast
strikingly with the public and official approval that marked him out as
a young artist of promise, even before he graduated from the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule
in 1883.
— Gustav Klimt first made himself known by the decorations he executed
(with his brother and their art school companion F. Matsch), for numerous
theatres and above all (on his own this time) for the Kunsthistorisches
Museum in Vienna, where he completed, in a coolly photographic style, the
work begun by Makart. At the age of thirty he moved into his own studio
and turned to easel painting. At thirty-five he was one of the founders
of the Vienna Secession; he withdrew eight years later, dismayed by the
increasingly strong trend towards naturalism.
The coruscating sensuality of Klimt's work
might seem in perfect accord with a society which recognized itself in those
frivolous apotheoses of happiness and well-being, the operettas of Johann
Strauss and Franz Léhar. Nothing could be further from the truth. Far from
being acknowledged as the representative artist of his age, Klimt was the
target of violent criticism; his work was sometimes displayed behind a screen
to avoid corrupting the sensibilities of the young. His work is deceptive.
Today we see in it the Byzantine luxuriance of form, the vivid juxtaposition
of colors derived from the Austrian rococo - aspects so markedly different
from the clinical abruptness of Egon Schiele. But we see it with expectations
generated by epochs of which his own age was ignorant.
For the sumptuous surface of Klimt's work
is by no means carefree. Its decorative tracery expresses a constant tension
between ecstasy and terror, life and death. Even the portraits, with their
timeless aspect, may be perceived as defying fate. Sleep, Hope (a pregnant
woman surrounded by baleful faces) and Death are subjects no less characteristic
than the Kiss. Yet life's seductions are still more potent in the vicinity
of death, and Klimt's works, although they do not explicitly speak of impending
doom, constitute a sort of testament in which the desires and anxieties
of an age, its aspiration to happiness and to eternity, receive definitive
expression. For the striking two-dimensionality with which Klimt surrounds
his figures evokes the gold ground of Byzantine art, a ground that, in negating
space, may be regarded as negating time - and thus creating a figure of
eternity. Yet in Klimt's painting, it is not the austere foursquare figures
of Byzantine art that confront us, but ecstatically intertwined bodies whose
flesh seems the more real for their iconical setting of gold.
— Ubaldo Oppi was a student of Klimt.
— Photo
of Klimt — a different Photo
of Klimt
—
LINKS
— The
Pianist and Piano Teacher Joseph Pembauer (1890, 69x55cm) — Pallas Athene
(1898, 75x75cm)
— Sonja Knips
(1898, 145x145cm) — Fable
(1883, 85x117cm)
— Auditorium
in the Old Burgtheater, Vienna (1888, 82x92cm) — Idyll
(1884, 50x74cm)
— Portrait
of a Lady _ Frau Heymann? (1894, 39x23cm)
— The
Three Ages of Women (1905, 178x198cm; 717x722pix, 129kb)
— Expectation
(1000x617pix, 141kb) — Fulfillment
(1000x623pix, 138kb)
— Malcesin
(933x1000pix, 261kb)
— Judith
(1901; 600x316pix _ ZOOM
to 1400x737pix) _ Judith was an Old Testament Jewish heroine. In the deuterocanonical
Book of Judith, she is portrayed as a widow who made her way into
the tent of Holofernes, general of Nebuchadrezzar, cut off his head, and
so saved her native town of Bethulia.
— Bauerngarten
mit Sonnenblumen (1905; 600x592pix _ ZOOM
to 1400x1381pix)
—
Hope I (1903; 2500x883pix; 284kb) _ 9-months pregnant nude with a Death's
head skull behind her. Klimt's bold portrayal of pregnancy contravened standards
of propriety in turn-of-the-century Vienna, forcing the withdrawal of the
painting from his first Secession retrospective. In this richly symbolic
painting, Klimt juxtaposes the promise of new life with the destructive
forces of death. Despite the monstrosities around her, the pregnant woman
remains calm and unperturbed, confident of the renewal within her. In preliminary
sketches for this painting the tone is more positive: the sketches show
a couple within a landscape reflecting upon their happiness. Klimt’s decision
to change the composition may have stemmed from his reaction to the death
of his second son during infancy in 1902.
— Vision
aka Hope II (1908, 110x110cm; 825x816pix, 87kb) _ 9-months pregnant
in colorful dress, bare-breasted, the woman bows her head and closes her
eyes, as if praying for the safety of her child. Peeping out from behind
her stomach is a death's head, sign of the danger she faces. At her feet,
three women with bowed heads raise their hands, presumably also in prayer
— although their solemnity might also imply mourning, as if they foresaw
the child's fate. Why, then, the painting's title? Although Klimt himself
called this work Vision, by association with Hope I,
it has become known as Hope II. There is a richness here to balance
the woman's gravity. Klimt was among the many artists of his time who were
inspired by sources not only within Europe but far beyond it. He lived in
Vienna, a crossroads of East and West, and he drew on such sources as Byzantine
art, Mycenean metalwork, Persian rugs and miniatures, the mosaics of the
Ravenna churches, and Japanese screens. In this painting the woman's gold-patterned
robe (drawn flat, as clothes are in Russian icons, although her skin is
rounded and dimensional) has an extraordinary decorative beauty. Here, birth,
death, and the sensuality of the living exist side by side suspended in
equilibrium.
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