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Developments in the 19th Century
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Art Styles
in 19th century -
Art Map
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Gustav Klimt
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Klimt
Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) was a refined and enigmatic portraitist, a
sensitive painter of landscapes, and a skilled draughtsman of
sensual and delicate female nudes. In his paintings and mural
cycles, he combined the intrinsic and the abstract, illusion and
decoration, and maintained a harmony between the subject and the
ornamentation. In this way, he incorporated the sublimity that was
characteristic of the artistic experience at the end of the 19th
century. The son of a goldsmith, he acquired a good reputation in
the traditional Viennese art world with his large allegorical
paintings in the Burgtheater and Kunsthistorisches Museum. However,
at the dawn of the new century, his designs for the ceiling of the
Great Hall of Vienna University disappointed the commissioning
authority. Instead of exalting positively the values of science and
reason as purveyors of truth, his concept was a comment on the
decadence of contemporary society. The portrayal was judged to be
too crude, merciless, and erotic. It was his subject matter - nude,
elderly, and obese men and women, all drawn by an invisible force
-that upset the authorities rather than his use of the Modern Style.
The layout was asymmetrical, the technique was strongly
two-dimensional, and the outlines were clear and sumptuously
curvilinear -a style that Klimt initiated with other Viennese
artists as members of the Secession from 1897.
Between 1900 and
1903, Klimt's style developed the characteristics
that would make him the chief exponent of the Jugenclstil. He
constructed images with mosaic patterns of arabesque colours and
designs, which, with their lack of depth, recalled Byzantine arts,
while also containing a heavy element of Symbolist abstraction. Two
important mural cycles exemplify this technique and represent the
perfect synthesis of the sensitive use of space: the first, the Beethoven Frieze for the Secession exhibition of 1902, was planned
by Hoffmann as an expression of the synthesis of all the arts. The
second was the mosaic for the dining room in the Palais Stoclet in
Brussels (1905-6), where the abstract figure barely emerges out of
the profusion of decoration created with a variety of sparkling
precious materials. From this moment onwards, until the end of World
War I, Klimt continued to develop his style by placing great
emphasis on abstraction and stylization. He was to become the
leading artist of an alternative version to avant-garde abstract
art, which had emerged from the same central European culture in the
same period.
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Gustav Klimt took courses at the School of Decorative
Arts in Vienna and began work as a painter and decorator of public
buildings, together with his brother and other artists. The style
they followed was an international form of Symbolism. In 1897, he
was the leading figure in the foundation of the Viennese Secession,
and after a few years he had become the best representative of the
Modern style. In his last years, he showed an appreciation of the
avant-garde tendencies of the Expressionists. His extraordinary
talent ensured the success of work that contained various expressive
materials in one composition, recalling Gothic and Byzantine
traditions while also anticipating the multimedia art of the 20th
century.
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Vienna between Reality and Illusion
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Gustav Klimt
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It was not long before the three friends were receiving commissions
for portraits, and in this way Klimt began to establish himself. The
portraits were painted from photographs, a process which met with
great approval. A certain photographic precision in the portrayal of
faces was to remain characteristic of Klimt. The Portrait of Joseph Pembauer, the
Pianist and Piano Teacher is typical of
these photographic portraits, with features bordering on the hyperreal. Yet Klimt also wanted to introduce his recently acquired
familiarity with classical Antiquity into the picture, filling the wide frame with classical elements, such as the
Delphic oracle, which seem to provide a commentary on the portrait.
The frame becomes part of the picture, and has both decorative and
symbolic significance. The excess of decor also serves to heighten
by contrast the face or figure in the centre of the painting.
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Portrait of Joseph Pembauer, the Pianist and Piano Teacher
1890
This portrait is an instance of Klimt's photographic manner of
painting faces during this period -
a hyperrealist before his time.
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Portrait of a Lady
1894
Coolness and reserve mark this lady, while not yet a femme
fatale, as one of Freud's castrating women.
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Old Woman
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Woman with a Cape and a Hat
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Portrait of Emile Floge
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From the beginning Klimt dared to cross the hypocritical boundaries
of respectability set by Viennese society. The eleven allegorical
paintings undertaken for the Kunsthistorisches Museum were supposed
to include a figure representing classical Greece, but in the Girl
from Tanagra one cannot help recognising a Viennese
cocotte, heavy lidded and made up like a "girl of easy virtue" -
Klimt's contemporary. In spite of the Greek amphora behind her,
giving an emphatically classical setting, this is Klimt's first
femme fatale, and respectable society took exception to her. Again,
and in spite of the classical vocabulary and allusions to Antiquity,
the personifications in Sculpture, Tragedy,
Music I and Music II are thoroughly Viennese, with
their bouffant hair-styles and languid demi-monde air...
In Plato's "Symposium" one encounters two types of Venus, the
celestial and the vulgar. Renoir makes the same distinction: "Naked
woman rises either from the sea or from bed; she is called Venus or
Nini, there is no better name for her..." The academic, idealised
nude is applauded by society, particularly when a historical message
can be discerned, but an everyday naked woman ready for love causes
a scandal. Before Klimt, Edouard Manet's Olympia had aroused hatred
and criticism. She likewise was a Nini - like the courtesan on the
next street corner - rather than a Venus in the style of Titian's
idealised mistresses, disguised as mythical goddesses. Neither in
Manet's Paris nor in Klimt's Vienna was it permissible for such
idols to be drawn from life.
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Girl
from Tanagra
1890-91
By presenting
ancient Greece in the charming contemporary form of a heavy-lidded
Viennese cocotte, Klimt shows that he is beginning to distance
himself from Academicism, and to challenge the hypocritically
respectable pretensions of his age. In fact, he is trying his hand
for the first time at a portrait of a "femme fatale"...
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Finished drawing for the allegory Sculpture, 1896
The figures exemplifying the sculptor's art in every age are rigid;
they see nothing. Yet the personification of "Sculpture" herself
springs directly from life, and her living eyes gaze seductively
at the beholder. This closeness to life was to become one of the
most distinctive qualities of Klimt's art.
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Finished drawing for the allegory Tragedy, 1897
Although Klimt's
task was to depict the whole history of art on the walls of the
Kunsthistorisches Museum, he could not resist the temptation to
present his female figures as denizens of the Viennese demi-monde.
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Music
(lithograph)
1901
"His manner of painting was baroque, but the resuit was Greek''. Coined with regard to
Franz von Stuck, this witty
saying characterises Klimt as well, whose vocabulary teems with
classical
allusions; yet it is in bringing figures to life that his great art lies.
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Music I
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 Love
1895
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 Josef Lewinsky
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Poster for the I. Secession
exhibition
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