GUSTAV KLIMT: AUSTRIAN SYMBOLISM IN PAINTING

Gustav Klimt

Today, The Grandma as received a wonderful visit. Tina Picotes, who has been travelling around Central Europe, has returned to Barcelona.

Tina has met with The Grandma to talk about her travel and one of their favourite painters, Gustav Klimt, who died on a day like today in 1918.

Before the arrival of Tina Picotes, The Grandma has studied two new and interesting lessons of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Vocabulary 17 & 18).

More information: Vocabulary 17-Other Countries & 18-In the Classroom

Gustav Klimt (July 14, 1862–February 6, 1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. Klimt is noted for his paintings, murals, sketches, and other objets d'art. Klimt's primary subject was the female body, and his works are marked by a frank eroticism. In addition to 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.

More information: Klim Museum

Early in his artistic career, he was a successful painter of architectural decorations in a conventional manner. As he developed a more personal style, his work was the subject of controversy that culminated when the paintings he completed around 1900 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 contemporary Egon Schiele.

Birch Forest by Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt was born in Baumgarten, near Vienna in Austria-Hungary, the second of seven children. His mother, Anna Klimt (née Finster), had an unrealized ambition to be a musical performer. His father, Ernst Klimt the Elder, formerly from Bohemia, was a gold engraver. All three of their sons displayed artistic talent early on. Klimt's younger brothers were Ernst Klimt and Georg Klimt.

Klimt lived in poverty while attending the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule, a school of applied arts and crafts, now the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where he studied architectural painting from 1876 until 1883. He revered Vienna's foremost history painter of the time, Hans Makart.

Klimt readily accepted the principles of a conservative training; his early work may be classified as academic. In 1877 his brother, Ernst, who, like his father, would become an engraver, also enrolled in the school. The two brothers and their friend, Franz Matsch, began working together and by 1880 they had received numerous commissions as a team that they called the Company of Artists. They also helped their teacher in painting murals in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Klimt began his professional career painting interior murals and ceilings in large public buildings on the Ringstraße, including a successful series of Allegories and Emblems.

More information: Gustav-Klimt

In 1888 Klimt received the Golden Order of Merit from Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria for his contributions to murals painted in the Burgtheater in Vienna. He also became an honorary member of the University of Munich and the University of Vienna.

In 1892 Klimt's father and brother Ernst both died, and he had to assume financial responsibility for his father's and brother's families. The tragedies also affected his artistic vision and soon he would move towards a new personal style. Characteristic of his style at the end of the 19th century is the inclusion of Nuda Veritas (naked truth) as a symbolic figure in some of his works, including Ancient Greece and Egypt (1891), Pallas Athene (1898) and Nuda Veritas (1899).

Tree of Life by Gustav Klimt

Historians believe that Klimt with the nuda veritas denounced both the policy of the Habsburgs and Austrian society, which ignored all political and social problems of that time. 

In the early 1890s Klimt met Austrian fashion designer Emilie Louise Flöge, a sibling of his sister-in-law, who was to be his companion until the end of his life.

His painting, The Kiss (1907–08), is thought to be an image of them as lovers. He designed many costumes that she produced and modeled in his works.

Klimt's Golden Phase was marked by positive critical reaction and financial success. Many of his paintings from this period included gold leaf. Klimt had previously used gold in his Pallas Athene (1898) and Judith I (1901), although the works most popularly associated with this period are the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) and The Kiss (1907–08).

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.

More information: Gustav Klimt

In 1904, he collaborated with other artists on the lavish Palais Stoclet, the home of a wealthy Belgian industrialist that was one of the grandest monuments of the Art Nouveau age. Klimt's contributions to the dining room, including both Fulfillment and Expectation, were some of his finest decorative works, and as he publicly stated, probably the ultimate stage of my development of ornament.

In 1911 his painting Death and Life received first prize in the world exhibitions in Rome. In 1915 Anna, his mother, died. Klimt died three years later in Vienna on February 6, 1918, having suffered a stroke and pneumonia due to the worldwide influenza epidemic of that year. He was buried at the Hietzinger Cemetery in Hietzing, Vienna. Numerous paintings by him were left unfinished.

More information: Austria

Whoever wants to know something about me 

-as an artist which alone is significant- 

they should look attentively at my pictures 

and there seek to recognise what I am and what I want.

Gustav Klimt