Klimt's primary subject was the female body, and his works are marked by a frank eroticism. Amongst his figurative works, which include allegories and portraits, he painted landscapes. Among the artists of the Vienna Secession, Klimt was the most influenced by Japanese art and its methods. Early in his artistic career, he was a successful painter of architectural decorations in a conventional manner.
As he began to develop a more personal style, his work was the subject of controversy that culminated when the paintings he completed around for the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna were criticized as pornographic.
He subsequently accepted no more public commissions, but achieved a new success with the paintings of his "golden phase", many of which include gold leaf. Klimt's work was an important influence on his younger peer Egon Schiele. Story Klimt the Late Deliverer Belvedere. The three would only be completed in the early s, and they would be criticized severely for their radical style and what was, according to the mores of the time, lewdness.
Unfortunately, the paintings were destroyed during the Second World War and only black-and-white reproductions of them remain. The painter was not alone in his opposition to the Austrian artistic establishment of the time.
In , he, together with forty other notable Viennese artists, resigned from the Academy of Arts and founded the "Union of Austrian Painters", more commonly known as the Secession.
Klimt was immediately elected president. While the Union had no clearly defined goals or support for particular styles, it was against the classicist establishment, which it found to be oppressive. In , Klimt finished the Beethoven Frieze for the 14th Vienna Secessionist exhibition, which was intended to be a celebration of the composer and featured a monumental, polychromed sculpture by Max Klinger.
Meant for the exhibition only, the frieze was painted directly on the walls with light materials. After the exhibition the painting was preserved, although it did not go on display until During this period Klimt did not confine himself to public commissions. Klimt was largely interested in painting figures; these works constitute the only genre aside from figure-painting which seriously interested Klimt. Klimt's Attersee paintings are of a number and quality so as to merit a separate appreciation.
Formally, the landscapes are characterized by the same refinement of design and emphatic patterning as the figural pieces. Deep space in the Attersee works is so efficiently flattened to a single plane, it is believed that Klimt painted them while looking through a telescope. Klimt's 'Golden Phase' was marked by positive critical reaction and success. Many of his paintings from this period used gold leaf; the prominent use of gold can first be traced back to Pallas Athene , and Judith and the Head of Holofernes , although the works most popularly associated with this period are the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I and The Kiss 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.
Historians believe that Klimt with the nuda veritas denounced both the policy of the Habsburgs and the Austrian society, which ignored all political and social problems of that time. His painting, The Kiss —08 , is thought to be an image of them as lovers. He designed many costumes she created and modeled in his works.
Article Wikipedia article References Wikipedia article. Wikipedia: en. Gustav Klimt Famous works. Goldfish Gustav Klimt Far Wall Gustav Klimt Right wall Gustav Klimt Danae Gustav Klimt The Kiss Gustav Klimt Gustav Klimt Featured. Art Nouveau Modern Style - artworks. Symbolism Style - 51 artworks. Japonism Style - 7 artworks. Realism Style - 5 artworks. While Klimt did not alter his subject matter during his final years, his painterly style did undergo significant changes.
Largely doing away with the use of gold and silver leaf, and ornamentation in general, the artist began using subtle mixtures of color, such as lilac, coral, salmon and yellow. Klimt also produced a staggering number of drawings and studies during this time, the majority of which were of female nudes, some so erotic that to this day they are seldom exhibited.
At the same time, many of Klimt's later portraits have been praised for the artist's greater attention to character and a supposed new concern for likeness. On January 11, , Klimt suffered a stroke, which left him paralyzed on his right side.
Bedridden and no longer able to paint or even sketch, Klimt sank into despair and contracted influenza. On February 6 th he died, one of the more famous victims of that year's flu pandemic.
He was just one of four great Vienna artists to die that year: Otto Wagner, Koloman Moser, and Egon Schiele all succumbed, the latter also an influenza victim. By the time of his death, various strands of modern art, including Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Constructivism, had all captured the attention of creative Europeans. Klimt's body of work was by then considered part of a bygone era in painting, which still focused on human and natural forms rather than a deconstruction, or outright renunciation, of those very things.
Klimt never married; never painted a single self-portrait intended as such; and never claimed to be revolutionizing art in any way. Klimt did not travel extensively, but he did leave Austria on a number of visits to other locations in Europe although on the one occasion he visited Paris, he left thoroughly unimpressed. With the groundbreaking Secession, Klimt's primary aim was to call attention to contemporary Viennese artists and in turn to call their attention to the much broader world of modern art beyond Austria's borders.
In this sense Klimt is responsible for helping to transform Vienna into a leading center for culture and the arts at the turn of the century. Klimt's direct influence on other artists and subsequent movements was quite limited. Much in the way Klimt revered Hans Makart but eventually deviated from his mentor's style, younger Viennese artists like Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka revered Klimt early on, only to mature into more quasi-abstract and expressionistic forms of painting.
At the age of 17, Schiele sought Klimt out, and developed a friendship with the master that reveals itself today in several comparisons between their works; Schiele's Cardinal and Nun Caress of , for example, is undoubtedly based on Klimt's The Kiss Lovers of Klimt introduced Schiele to numerous gallery owners, artists, and models, including Valerie Wally Neuzil, with whom Schiele began a relationship in around the time the two moved together to Krumau, in Bohemia now Cesky Krumlov, in the Czech Republic - though in Neuzil returned to Vienna to model again for Klimt.
Both Schiele and Klimt produced portraits of the wealthy avant-garde patron Friederika Maria Beer-Monti, in and , respectively; in fact, initially Klimt declined the commission for the later portrait of Beer-Monti because Schiele had already completed his. While some critics and historians contend that Klimt's work should not be included in the canon of modern art , his oeuvre - particularly his paintings postdating - remains striking for its visual combinations of the old and the modern, the real and the abstract.
Klimt produced his greatest work during a time of economic expansion, social change, and the introduction of radical ideas, and these traits are clearly evident in his paintings. Klimt created a highly personal style, and the meaning of many of his works cannot be deciphered completely without knowledge of his own personal relationships with those depicted and, due to Klimt's careful discretion in his private life, will probably never be fully comprehended.
Other works are virtually inscrutable due to the baffling arrangements of their content. This situation nonetheless arguably contributes to Klimt's stature, as his paintings will continually be shrouded in some sort of mystery and invite myriad interpretations and intense critical rumination.
Klimt has achieved a kind of immortality from the controversy that he generated from the content of his works at the turn of the century and the mystery surrounding his relationships with his sitters, but he may have even surpassed this long after his death with the fates of some of his most famous works. Several of Klimt's paintings entered the collections of Jewish connoisseurs in the s, and this fact, probably combined with Klimt's status as a prominent modern artist, contributed to their confiscation by the Nazis after and their postwar placement, if not destroyed, in state museums.
Meanwhile, the original owners and their heirs - most notably the Altmann family, who held claims to Klimt's Adele Bloch-Bauer I - have since filed lawsuits to recover the paintings for private ownership, some of which have been successful. Such events have raised considerably Klimt's profile as an artist, with the sale of some of these recovered works bringing record prices.
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