Klimt, Gustav

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KLIMT, GUSTAV

KLIMT, GUSTAV (1862–1918), Austrian painter and founding member of the Viennese Secession.

Gustav Klimt was a galvanizing figure in finde-siècle Vienna, which in no small measure due to him turned into an alternative center of the European art world alongside Paris. Born in Vienna, he studied from 1876 to 1883 at the Kunstgewerbeschule of the Österreichisches Museum für Kunst und Industrie. His initial reputation as an academic painter culminated in well received commissions for ceiling paintings in the staircases of Vienna's Burg theater (1886–1888) and Kunsthistorisches Museum (1890–1891). Executed in collaboration with his brother Ernst and their colleague Franz Matsch, Klimt contributed mythological and historical scenes relating to the theater at the former, and spandrels—the space between the arches and their frames—representing Egyptian art, Greek art, and early Italian art at the latter. A decisive turning point in Klimt's career came with the 1892 commission by the Austrian Ministry of Education to collaborate with Matsch on the ceiling paintings in the Great Hall of the University of Vienna. In the course of his work on these canvases, the academic painter steeped in neoclassical tradition transformed himself into a modern artist.

Klimt was placed in charge of three of four paintings representing the faculties—philosophy, medicine, and jurisprudence, with theology to be painted by Matsch—and several related spandrels. While Klimt's first sketches were still in keeping with his early academic manner, the compositions gradually evolved to embody his mature, modern style: allegories in the form of eroticized, primarily female bodies and hauntingly isolated faces embedded in large scale, nonrepresentational areas. The latter were filled with an amorphous haze or manifold ornamental patterns derived from Mycenaean, Egyptian, and Byzantine art. If his patrons, a university commission reporting to the Ministry of Education, were skeptical and in effect rejected the results Klimt presented, this was due to dramatic changes in conception and style. These changes clashed with the work of his collaborator and made the paintings unsuitable for viewing from far below. Klimt worked on the paintings until 1907, long after any hope of their installation was lost, but they remained unfinished and ultimately perished in a fire in 1945 at Schloss Immendorf, where they had been brought for protection from the war.

Versions of Klimt's university paintings were on view in exhibitions of the Vereinigung bildender Künstler Österreichs (Sezession)—commonly known as the Vienna Secession—in 1900, 1901, 1902, and 1903. The organization was founded in 1897 by a group of artists, designers, and architects that broke away from the established local society of artists, the Künstlerhausgenossenschaft (Artists' house society), in order to promote modern, international trends in the visual arts through its journal, Ver Sacrum, and through regular exhibitions in its own building designed by its architect member Joseph Maria Olbrich. As one of its oldest and best known members, Klimt exerted great influence over the new organization: he served as its first president, designed the poster and catalog cover for the inaugural exhibition, and received his own one man exhibition, Klimt-Kollektive, in 1903, displaying seventy eight paintings and drawings. His contribution featured prominently in the Secession's legendary fourteenth exhibition of 1902, which involved a large scale collaborative Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) of frescoes, sculptures, reliefs, and interior designs centered around a Beethoven statue by the German artist Max Klinger. Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, restored in 1985, stretched over three walls of a room framing the view into the main room. Its underlying program was humanity's progress from desire to fulfillment, which has been read as a representation of the "Ode to Joy" in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Abstract elements and areas now became even more prominent than in the university paintings. Ornamental patterns proliferate independently and far beyond the clothes and decorative objects worn by the allegorical figures. Their meanings shift, alternately suggesting material luxury, sensual excess, and spiritual transcendence.

The Vienna Secession is best known in the early twenty first century for the kind of integration of visual and applied arts exemplified by the Beethoven exhibition. That shared interest prevailed until 1905. Klimt and especially his peers had already shifted their efforts to a new workshop like organization known as the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna workshop) and left the Secession following internal

splits with artists favoring easel painting. Decorative techniques, materials, and motifs played an increasingly important role in Klimt's work. The Stoclet Frieze—the painter's contribution to the Wiener Werkstätte's magnum opus, the design of the palace of the Belgian millionaire Adolphe Stoclet in Brussels—eclectically applied materials such as gold, silver, enamel, coral, and semiprecious stones in techniques such as inlay and mosaic. Likewise Klimt's paintings on canvas entered the so called golden period, exemplified famously by allegories like The Kiss of 1907–1908 and female portraits like Adele Bloch-Bauer I. Human faces seem mere excuses for ornamental patterns in different tones of gold, amounting both to perceptual onslaught and fetishistic displacement, that is, a transfer of erotic desire for a person onto a substitute. Klimt was often accused for producing pornography while his sitters were suspected of having affairs with the artist. However, the eroticism is greatly tamed in Klimt's paintings by the proliferation of the decorative, especially in comparison to Klimt's drawings, which count among the most erotically evocative and elegantly sensuous works of modern art.

Klimt is broadly associated with late-nineteenth-century symbolist art, which also combined figurative motifs and abstract means to represent personifications of emotional and spiritual states. Leading contemporary painters such as Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, sometimes categorized as symbolist, would prove influential to the beginnings of purely abstract art in the early twentieth century. Klimt never had the same impact, perhaps because his understanding of the signifying capacity of pure forms and colors was more limited, and certainly more playful, than the systematic investigations of his contemporaries.

See alsoFin de Siècle; Modernism; Symbolism; Vienna.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Bahr, Hermann. Gegen Klimt. Vienna and Leipzig, 1903.

Nebehay, Christian M., ed. Gustav Klimt: Eine Dokumentation. Vienna, 1969.

Novotny, Fritz, and Johannes Dobai. Gustav Klimt, with a Catalogue Raisonné of His Paintings. Translated by Karen Olga Philippson. London and New York, 1968.