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"All fine art is erotic."

i of ten

"Whoever wants to know something about me - as an creative person which alone is significant - they should look attentively at my pictures and there seek to recognize what I am and what I want."

2 of ten

"Sometimes I miss out the morning'southward painting session and instead written report my Japanese books in the open."

3 of 10

"There is no cocky-portrait of me."

4 of x

"There is nothing that special to run across when looking at me. I'm a painter who paints day in day out, from morning till evening - figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits."

5 of 10

"I can pigment and draw. I believe this myself and a few other people say that they believe this likewise. But I'm not certain of whether it'due south true."

half-dozen of 10

"Even when I have to write a simple letter of the alphabet I'g scared stiff, as if faced with looming seasickness."

seven of x

"Today I want to start working over again in earnest - I'm looking forwards to information technology because doing nothing does become rather dull after a while."

viii of 10

"Enough of censorship. I am having recourse to self-help. I want to get out."

"eroticism is present in all of Klimt's work, including the landscapes"

Summary of Gustav Klimt

Austrian painter Gustav Klimt had many quirks. Once, his patron Friederika Maria Beer-Monti came to his studio to have her portrait painted, wearing a flashy polecat jacket designed by Klimt'south friends at the Wiener Werkstätte. One would remember Klimt would corroborate, simply instead he had her plough it inside out to expose the red silk lining, and that was how he painted her. But Klimt, Vienna's most renowned creative person of the era, had the prestige to do this. He is still remembered as ane of the greatest decorative painters of the twenty^thursday century, while too producing one of the century's most significant bodies of erotic art. Initially successful in his endeavors for architectural commissions in an academic mode, his come across with more mod trends in European fine art encouraged him to develop his own highly personal, eclectic, and ofttimes fantastic style. As the co-founder and first president of the Vienna Secession, Klimt also ensured that this movement would become widely influential. Klimt never courted scandal, only the highly controversial subject thing of his work in a traditionally very conservative artistic middle dogged his career. Although he never married, Klimt remains romantically linked to several mistresses, with whom he is said to accept fathered 14 children, despite his extreme discretion about his personal life.

Accomplishments

• Klimt first achieved acclamation equally a decorative painter of historical scenes and figures through his many commissions to embellish public buildings. He continued to refine the decorative qualities and then that the flattened, shimmering patterns of his nearly-abstract compositions, what is now known as his "Gilded Stage" works, ultimately became the existent subjects of his paintings.
• Though a "fine art" painter, Klimt was an outstanding exponent of the equality betwixt the fine and decorative arts. Having achieved some of his early success by painting within a greater architectural framework, he accepted many of his best-known commissions that were designed to complement other elements of a complete interior, thereby creating a Gesamtkunstwerk (total piece of work of art). Later in his career, he worked in concert with artists of the Wiener Werkstätte, the Austrian blueprint organization that aimed to improve the quality and visual appeal of everyday objects.
• Klimt was one of the most important founders of the Vienna Secession in 1897, and served equally its initial president, though he was called less for his completed oeuvre - relatively small at that indicate - than his youthful personality and willingness to claiming authority. His strength and international fame as the most famous Art Nouveau painter contributed much to the Secession's early success - merely too the movement'south swift fall from prominence when he left it in 1905.
• Although Klimt's fine art is now widely pop, it was neglected for much of the twenty^th century. His works for public spaces provoked a tempest of opposition in his ain day, facing charges of obscenity due to their erotic content, eventually causing Klimt to withdraw from government commissions altogether. His drawings are no less provocative and give total expression to his considerable sexual appetite.
• Despite his fame and generosity in mentoring younger artists, including Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, Klimt produced virtually no straight followers and his work has consistently been regarded as highly personal and singular, fifty-fifty upwards to the present day. However, his paintings share many formal and thematic characteristics with the Expressionists and Surrealists of the interwar years, even though many of them may not have been familiar with Klimt'southward art.

Biography of Gustav Klimt

Proudly acclaiming, "There is no self-portrait of me," Klimt found his ways of expression non in projecting his own paradigm, but in the erotic power of his sensual nudes, his femme fatales. He was, he said, more interested in "painting.. other people, to a higher place all women."

Of import Art by Gustav Klimt

Progression of Fine art

1888-89

The Auditorium of the Erstwhile Burgtheater

This was an important commission for Klimt's early career: the Vienna city quango asked Klimt and his partner Franz Matsch to paint images of the quondam Burgtheater, the city'southward opera house - congenital in 1741 and slated for demolition subsequently its replacement was finished in 1888 - equally a record of the theater'south existence. Unlike Matsch's counterpart to this movie, which shows the phase of the Burgtheater from a seat in the auditorium, Klimt's handling does the exact opposite - a strange pick, but i that is quite significant architecturally, every bit information technology shows the full arrangements of loges and auditorium flooring seats along with the ceiling decoration. It is typical of the academic style of Klimt'southward early work, and of the influence on him of Hans Makart.

When word of this committee was leaked to the public, many people begged Klimt to insert their portraits, however small, into the motion-picture show through special sittings with the artist, as existence immortalized on sheet as a regular attendee at the Burgtheater constituted a tangible keepsake of one's social status. As a result, the painting serves not only as a valuable tape of the theater's architecture, but also essentially as a catalog of the city's political, cultural, and economic elites - over 150 individuals in all. Amongst the audience members are Austria's Prime Minister; Vienna's Mayor; the surgeon Theodor Billroth; the composer Johannes Brahms; and the Emperor'due south mistress, the actress Katherina Schratt. Though the subject is advisable for a history painting, its dimensions (the width, its longest side, measures less than 37 inches) are diminutive, making the precision of Klimt'southward individual portraits all the more impressive. Critics at the time agreed, every bit Klimt was awarded the coveted Emperor's Prize in 1890 for this painting, which significantly raised his profile within the Viennese fine art community, and a flurry of other important public commissions for buildings on the Ringstrasse soon followed.

Gouache on paper - The Historical Museum of Vienna

1898

Pallas Athene

Though the Secessionists were known as a group that attempted to break with artistic traditions, their human relationship with the past was more circuitous than a simple forward-looking mentality. Klimt, along with many of his swain painters and graphic artists, cultivated a keen understanding of the symbolic nature of mythical and allegorical figures and narratives from Greece, Rome, and other ancient civilizations. With his soft colors and uncertain boundaries between elements, Klimt begins the dissolution of the figural in the management of abstraction, that would come to full force in the years after he left the Secession. This painting exudes thus a sensory conception of the imperial, powerful presence of the Greco-Roman goddess of wisdom, Athena, and the inability of humans to full grasp that, rather than a well-baked, detailed visual summation of her persona.

Also significantly, the hazy quality of the paradigm allows Klimt to emphasize the goddess' androgynous character, a blurring of gender identity that was featured in ancient descriptions and depictions of her, and explored past many other artists and cultural luminaries at the plough of the century. She is dressed in the armed forces regalia that traditionally identifies her as a warrior and the protector of her eponymous city, Athens - qualities unremarkably associated with masculinity. Just the strands of hair that thinly drape downward from each side of her cervix (and well-nigh alloy with the golden colour of her helmet and breastplate) give a hint every bit to her femininity. Barely visible at the left side of the painting, she holds the nude figure of Nike, representing victory, arguably the simply clear feminine reference in the work.

The haziness evokes the contemporaneous exploration of dreams past Sigmund Freud, whose seminal piece of work on the subject field would be published in Vienna just ii years after. It is tempting to read Klimt'southward painting in the context of Freud's view of dreams as the fulfillment of wishes, which might suggest that the powerful, imperious woman is the object of male want, but too potentially that the traditional feminine persona must be costumed in club to attain such powerful status.

Oil on canvas - Collection of the Wien Museum, Vienna

1900-01

Medicine

In 1894, Klimt was commissioned by the Ministry of Culture to provide paintings for the new Bully Hall of the Academy of Vienna, recently constructed on the Ringstrasse. Klimt'due south task was to paint 3 monumental canvases apropos the themes of Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence, respectively. Past the fourth dimension Klimt began painting the canvases four years later on, withal, he had joined the Secession and abased the naturalism of the Old Burgtheater to challenge the conventional subject area affair. The overarching theme that was supposed to unify the three University paintings was "the triumph of low-cal over darkness," within which Klimt was granted a complimentary mitt. None of the finished products, withal, conveys this theme with any degree of clarity. Medicine, the second of the 3 to be unveiled, was the canvas that caused the near controversy.

This detail from Medicine shows the figure of Hygeia, the mythological girl of the god of medicine, who was located at the lesser center of the canvas and identified by an accompanying ophidian and the loving cup of Lethe. In a higher place Hygeia rose a alpine column of light, to the correct of which rose a web of nude figures intertwined with the skeleton of Death. To the other side of the light column floated a nude female whose pelvis was thrust forward, while below her feet floated an babe (to whom she might accept merely given birth) wrapped in a swath of tulle. The imagery provoked a storm of criticism on two levels. First, faculty and Ministry building officials charged that it was pornographic, specially the female person with the thrusting pelvis - thereby demonstrating the stodginess of Vienna'due south cultural customs. Second - maybe a more valid statement - the painting did nothing to illustrate the themes of medicine, either as a preventative or healing tool. The acrimonious response to Klimt's works eventually prompted him, in 1905, to buy back the three works for thirty,000 crowns with the assistance of his patron Baronial Lederer, who received Philosophy in return.

Klimt'south piece of work proves hard to decipher, and it appears that one of his goals with the painting was to evidence the ambiguity of homo life, simultaneously representing the themes of birth and death. In some ways, it proves highly ironic, as Vienna at the fourth dimension was one of the major centers of medical research: along with Sigmund Freud, who had just published The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), it was home to the pioneering intestinal surgeon Theodor Billroth. In this respect, Medicine demonstrates how, despite the dandy inroads the Secession had made in the four years since its founding, the movement had not decisively overturned conservative attitudes towards modernistic art in Vienna. For Klimt, the entire affair represented an ultimate public humiliation and rejection; he did non exhibit in Vienna for five years after 1903, and he swore off official commissions and withdrew to accept on simply private portrait commissions or landscapes for the remainder of his career. His trio of University paintings, born into a firestorm of controversy, met their own fiery fate as they found their way into the collections of Jews and became iii of Klimt'south many works confiscated by the Nazis. They were incinerated in May 1945 within the Schloss Immendorf, the lower Austrian castle where they had been stored, past retreating SS troops.

Oil on canvass - Destroyed in 1945

1902

The Beethoven Frieze

The Beethoven Frieze, but a detail of which is shown here, was painted by Klimt for the 14^thursday Secession exhibition in 1902 - arguably the grouping'due south most famous - defended to the eponymous German composer who was a longtime Vienna resident. Information technology is a monumental work, measuring some 7 feet tall by 112 feet long, and weighing four tons. Painted on the interior walls of the Secession Building, it was preserved but was not displayed again until 1986; it is now permanently on view in the basement.

The Beethoven Frieze forms part of the exhibition-as-Gesamtkustwerk, or total artistic environment that the Secessionists sought to create. For them, this often included all branches of the arts - non but the visual arts, but also the performing arts, such equally symphonic works, theater, and opera; accordingly, the contemporary Viennese composer Gustav Mahler's adaptation of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was playing at the opening of this exhibition of the Secession. The Gesamtkunstwerk is underscored past details such as the incorporation of gems into the painted surfaces to add to the shimmering furnishings.

The frieze'due south narrative tracks the narrative of three female figures, chosen Genii, that represent humanity seeking fulfillment. They rely on a gigantic knight in shining armor - said to exist representative of a swell leader for the German-speaking countries of Europe - to lead them through a harrowing minefield of characters whose elongated and exaggerated forms at once reference the Gorgons like Medusa from Greek mythology and represent disaster and vices such as sickness, madness, expiry, intemperance, and wantonness. Fulfillment does come at the end, represented by a pair of nude female and male figures locked in an almost erotic cover in a golden aura, surrounded by a choir, a reference to the choral performance of Schiller's poem "Ode to Joy" at the terminate of the 9th Symphony.

Despite the modern notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the reliance on very old tropes - non only figures from Greek mythology but the flattened depictions of figures like those seen on aboriginal Greek vases - demonstrate the range of influences on the Secessionists. It besides suggests their desire to synthesize a gimmicky art from old and new, innovation and tradition, which would respond to the hopes and desires of turn-of-the century society.

Casein pigment on stucco, inlaid with diverse materials - The Secession Building, Vienna

1903-07

Adele Bloch-Bauer I

This piece of work, considered by many to exist Klimt's finest, may also be his most famous due to its central role in one of the most notorious cases of Nazi art theft. Of all the many women Klimt painted from life, Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of the Viennese broker and sugar magnate Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, was one of his favorites, sitting for 2 portraits and serving every bit the model for several other paintings, including his famous Judith I (1901). Though Klimt was rumored to be romantically involved with numerous women he painted, his extreme discretion means there is notwithstanding no consensus amongst scholars as to the exact nature of his and Adele Bloch-Bauer's human relationship.

The painting is principally concerned with the dissolution of the real into pure abstruse form. Though Klimt depicts Bloch-Bauer as seated, it is almost impossible to discern the form of the chair or to dissever the forms of her clothing from the groundwork. Klimt was largely unconcerned at this time with depicting his sitter's character, and even less and so with providing location and context, omissions that were common in all of Klimt's earlier portraits. Klimt's biographer, Frank Whitford, has described the moving-picture show as "the virtually elaborate example of the tyranny of the decorative" in the artist'due south work. The use of aureate and silver leafage underscores the precious nature of the jewels Bloch-Bauer is wearing, also as the depths of the love for her felt by Ferdinand, who commissioned the painting. It places the piece of work squarely inside Klimt's "Golden Phase" from the first decade of the 20^th century, wherein he used dozens of gold patterns and shades of the metal in his paintings to create these glittering furnishings. Not surprisingly, when the Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere received the painting, it was retitled The Lady in Gold, the name by which information technology is notwithstanding sometimes known today.

Despite his motility towards mod brainchild, Klimt's piece of work yet draws on several older sources. Most prominent are the Byzantine mosaics of the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, which Klimt visited in December 1903. Many of these mosaics use a similar apartment golden groundwork, and depict the bejeweled Byzantine empress Theodora; Klimt's delineation of the choker worn past Adele Bloch-Bauer in this portrait is modeled on these mosaics. Art historians also trace the eye-like imagery in Bloch-Bauer's dress to Egyptian motifs, while the whorls and coils and other decorative devices based on Bloch-Bauer'south initials arguably resemble designs from ancient Mycenae and classical Greece.

Adele died in 1925. As the Bloch-Bauers were Jewish, Ferdinand's assets became targets of Nazi plunder afterwards the annexations of Austria and western Czechoslovakia in 1938, and Ferdinand ultimately fled to Switzerland. The Nazis installed the painting in the Austrian Galerie Dais, which renamed information technology and eventually took the position that no fine art theft had taken place. Ferdinand died in 1946, just non before willing his confiscated paintings (including Bloch-Bauer I and five other Klimt works) to his nephew and 2 nieces. These included Maria Altmann, who in 2000 filed a lawsuit to recover the paintings. The high-profile case, which came before the United States Supreme Court, was ultimately successful and the paintings were returned to the Bloch-Bauer family in 2006. That June Altmann sold Bloch-Bauer I to American collector and cosmetics magnate Ronald S. Lauder for $135 1000000, at the time a tape toll paid for any painting. Lauder gave Bloch-Bauer I to the Neue Galerie for German and Austrian fine art in New York, which he founded, where it hangs on permanent display today. It remains probably the most famous example of Nazi fine art theft, having been the subject of numerous manufactures, books, and films.

Oil, gold and argent leaf on sheet - Neue Galerie, New York City

1907-08

The Kiss

The Kiss is perchance Klimt's most popular and clear celebration of sexual dear, and probably his most reproduced piece of work. Like Bloch-Bauer I, it is i of the key elective paintings of Klimt's "Aureate Phase" lasting roughly from 1903-09, and is often considered a prime example of Fine art Nouveau painting. It demonstrates Klimt's ability to synthesize a work while drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, even though the overall limerick remains fairly straightforward.

Klimt's subject field affair is elementary, depicting a couple locked in an intimate embrace on the border of a meadow, indicated by the luminous, most quilt-like pattern of flowers that extends beneath them. The composition'due south construction suggests a high degree of familiarity with the Arts and Crafts movement. The flattened patterning of the meadow and the clothing of the figures, for example, resemble the fabrics produced by William Morris in the belatedly-19^th century. Klimt's use of fine materials, particularly gold and silver leaf, help highlight the precious nature of the piece of work and bespeak to a high degree of specialized craftsmanship for their use on sheet; their presence here also recalls the combination of colored and gold paint used in medieval colophons and other illuminated manuscripts - sources that also inspired Morris in creating the Kelmscott Press.

With Klimt, however, the source material becomes much more than complex. Nosotros can trace the use of gold to his affinity for Byzantine art, such as the gold fields for the mosaics he had seen in Ravenna in 1903. And while Morris and medieval sources used such precious materials to exalt textual subject matter - either the word of God or great literature - Klimt uses them to highlight the sacred nature of human relationships and the bail between sensual lovers, a key theme undergirding much of Art Nouveau. The link with Art Nouveau is further underscored by Klimt'southward exaggeration of the figures, every bit well as the way that he seems to meld their forms together despite the square-circle/male-female dichotomy. Finally, the solitude of the figures to the central strip of the sheet, with their heads nearly touching the top border, retrieve techniques used in vertical Japanese pillar wood-block prints, which Klimt avidly collected.

Given Klimt's studies for this work that depict the male person figure with a bristles, information technology is tempting to read the kiss as autobiographical, with the painter as the human being and Emilie Flöge or Adele Bloch-Bauer perhaps serving as the model for the adult female, though this remains purely speculation. By leaving the identity of the figures as ambiguous, Klimt allows the paradigm of The Kiss to embody a universal, timeless vision of romantic beloved, rather than simply a personal and situational significance, thereby broadening its appeal.

Oil, gold and argent leafage on canvas - Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna

1909-x

The Park

Get-go just after the turn of the century, Klimt turned to mural painting as another genre of involvement, one which would occupy him for the last fifteen years of his career. Though his landscapes such as this 1 suggest that Pointillism exerted a neat influence on him, Klimt never expressed an interest in utilizing optics in his work, and the formal aspects of The Park seem to carry this out. Klimt does not use diametrically-opposed dots of color to increment the luminance of the greens, yellows, or blues present in the trees' leaves, for example. Rather, the top 9-tenths of the square painting announced equally a massive textured abstract patchwork or decorative mosaic. Only with the aid of the work'due south lower section does their representational function go evident.

Klimt'due south manipulation of space becomes a fundamental strategy for this work, as the seemingly solid, unbroken mass of foliage visually dominates the canvass and seems fifty-fifty to be pressing downward on the space underneath it, including the tree trunks (those in the foreground virtually appear as if they are existence squashed), and the metal demote at the bottom right appears equally if it volition soon be swallowed past the descending curtain of leaves. Despite the part of the bench as a location for humans to residual while ostensibly enjoying the natural surroundings, here the bench welcomes no sitters, whose heads might be otherwise crushed or lost in the tangle of foliage. In this respect, therefore, Klimt is arguably drawing on the Romantic tradition of the sublime, with its exposure of the awesome power of nature, a theme that had been powerfully explored a century before by German painter Caspar David Friedrich, who, like Klimt, cultivated a solitary professional beingness as a hard artist to approach and sympathise. Thus, while cognizant of the developments of modern life in the transformations of the city around him, Klimt in The Park acknowledges human'south connected inability to fully tame nature and curve it to his wishes.

Oil on canvas - The Museum of Modern Fine art, New York

c. 1913-xiv

Nude Figure

Like most visual artists, Klimt produced hundreds of drawings and sketches during his lifetime, many in preparation for larger works. He was the embodiment of the stereotypical male artist whose studio was also the location for his liaisons with many of his nude female person models - a pattern of behavior that, unfortunately, has a lineage that extends back long earlier Klimt's era and forward to the present 24-hour interval. Klimt was charming, and with the diverse women he had relationships with he fathered some fourteen children - peradventure more. He was also a dandy gentleman of the female body, and sketches of women, specially nude models, make up a big per centum of his surviving graphic work. It was here that Klimt probed the most erotic portions of his encephalon, even more and then than his paintings, which often are rather tame by comparison. Many of his drawings of women are extremely explicit sexually - sometimes besides much so to exist shown in museum exhibitions fifty-fifty today, and as a result, published examples of Klimt's virtually erotic drawings are not always easy to locate.

This cartoon, which dates from the later part of Klimt's career, is a typical case of his erotic oeuvre. The sketch of a woman reclining and touching her genitals simply gives the barest essentials of the contours of the effigy, with even less item every bit to the surfaces and spaces surrounding her. We are not even certain if much of her torso is covered in a bedsheet or a piece of clothing, or fifty-fifty what the surface is underneath her. The most detailed portion of the drawing, possibly appropriately, is the region containing her hand and pubic hair. This, in combination with the looseness of the rest of the drawing - which, equally a result, leaves much for the viewer's imagination to fill in - helps to heighten its overall eroticism. All the same another layer of salaciousness from the imagination is arguably added past the anonymity to u.s.a. of many of Klimt'south models.

Every bit famous equally Klimt's eroticism may exist, his forays into this area are hardly unique. Klimt himself, as fine art historian Kirk Varnedoe has noted, likely saw on several occasions Rodin's like loose renderings of female nudes, oft in quite explicit poses, dating from the belatedly 1890s and onwards. Klimt'south own creative expression may pale in comparison to that of his student Egon Schiele, whom Klimt introduced to various models while the former was under his tutelage. In office this is considering Klimt - especially after the University paintings controversy - took pains to be publicly discreet about his sketches and other studio activities. By contrast, Schiele, was known during his short career for his repeated run-ins with authorities for the nude models - including some children - that he employed, many of whom Schiele depicted in similarly explicit poses.

Blue pencil on paper - Collection of the Vienna Historical Museum

Similar Art

Influences and Connections

Influences on Artist

Influenced by Artist

• 

  Hans Makart

• 

  Margaret MacDonald

• 

  Max Klinger

• 

  Adolf Loos

• 

  Franz Matsch

• 

  Emilie Floge

• 

  Josef Hoffmann

• 

  Josef Hoffmann

• 

  Joseph Maria Olbrich

• 

  Koloman Moser

• 

  Otto Wagner

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