Gustav Klimt
The beginning of the 20th century was a febrile time in Viennese culture. It witnessed the fall of the Austro-Hungary empire, gave birth at the same time to the thinking of Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein, to the music of Arnold Schoenberg and the art of Gustav Klimt.
“Art is a bridge between the soul and the world.” Gustav Klimt said before he died 107 years ago on 6th February 1918. The most prominent member of the Vienna Secession Movement, his paintings are perhaps the most recognisable and individualistic of his entire generation.
His primary subject was the female body, and his works are marked by a frank eroticism. They are often distinguished by elegant gold or coloured decoration, spirals and swirls, and phallic shapes used to conceal the more erotic positions of the drawings upon which many of his paintings are based. One of his common themes was the dominant woman, the femme fatale.
We instantly know they are his by the lavish use of gold leaf. Klimt’s ‘Golden Phase’ was marked by positive critical reaction and success. The works most popularly associated with this period are the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) and (1907-1908). Klimt travelled little but trips to Venice and Ravenna, both famous for their beautiful mosaics, most likely inspired his gold technique and his Byzantine imagery.
In 1886, Gustav and his brother, Ernst, also a painter but better known for his interior designs, were awarded the Golden Service Cross (Verdienstkreuz) for their decoration of the Viennese Burgtheater, and Klimt was commissioned to paint the Auditorium of the Old Burgtheater, the work that would bring him to the height of his fame.
This painting, with its almost photographic accuracy, is considered one of the greatest achievements in Naturalism. As a result, Klimt was awarded the Emperor’s Prize and became a fashionable portraitist, as well as the leading artist of his day. Paradoxically, it was at this point, with a fabulous career as a classicist painter unfolding before him, that Klimt began turning towards the radical new styles of the Art Noveau of which his work is emblematic.
In 1897, Klimpt was elected President of the Secession, a radical movement of Austrian painters opposed to the traditional Austrian artistic establishment.
In 1902, Gustav Klimt finished the Beethoven Frieze for the 14th Vienna Secessionist Exhibition, a celebration of the composer which also featured a monumental, polychromed sculpture by Max Klinger.
His painting method was very deliberate and painstaking and he required lengthy sittings by his subjects. Though very active sexually, he kept his affairs discreet and he avoided personal scandal. His lifelong partner and muse was the designer Emilie Flöge, his companion in all his artistic explorations.
Gustav Klimt’s paintings have brought some of the highest prices recorded for individual works of art. In 2006, the 1907 Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, was purchased for the Neue Galerie in New York by Ronald Lauder for a reported US $135 million, and set the record as the highest reported price ever paid for a painting to that date.
This documentary, being an account of Klimt’s life and works from photographs and paintings and the analysis of a couple of rather earnest art historians, is a bit academic but it does give all the information you could possibly want about this significant artist in an easily absorbable and authoritative form. And it reinforces the perception of Gustav Klimt as the artistic spirit of his age.
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