Gustav Klimt

Austrian artist

• Born: July 14, 1862
• Birthplace: Baumgarten, Austria
• Died: February 6, 1918
• Place of death: Vienna, Austria

Klimt helped found the Vienna Secession as a reaction against what proponents believed was an art of stodgy realism. He became the leading artist of the early twentieth century, both as a Symbolist and as a draftsman and painter of the erotic.

Early Life

Gustav Klimt (GEWS-tahf klihmt) was born to Anna (née Finster) Klimt and Ernst Klimt, a gold engraver with great ambition but without great opportunity to exercise his considerable imaginative skills. Klimt was one of seven children brought up in modest means due to their father’s commercial failures but with admirable taste, often a sure recipe for rebels. At age fourteen, Klimt entered the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) of the museum of Applied Art in Vienna in 1876, studying with Julius Berger. After completing his art training, Klimt formed the Künstlercompagnie, an artists’ co-op, in 1883 with his brother, Ernst Klimt, and Franz von Matsch.

Life’s Work

Klimt helped pioneer the nineteenth century Vienna Secession movement, which distanced itself from what its proponents regarded as bourgeois servile art, and helped establish in Austria what was considered Art Nouveau in Francophone Europe. Klimt also was known as a symbolist for his use of careful allusions to mythology. He associated with the Wiener Werkstatte (Vienna Workstate) arts and crafts movement, which took pride in the totality of many decorative arts as well as the traditional fine arts, an association likely inspired by his training at the Kunstgewerbeschule and because his father was a goldsmith.

Known for his admixture of textile patterns into painting and with some notoriety for an almost voyeuristic eroticism, Klimt’s impact on twentieth century art was influential. His most famous painting, The Kiss (1907-1908), has been reproduced on countless posters, postcards, and other items, becoming an icon for 1990’s youth. Less appreciated by popular culture but recognized or admired by scholars and sensualists alike, his femmes fatales such as Judith (1901) and Danae (1907-1908) are balanced by perhaps his most powerful image of Pallas Athene.

In I can paint and I can draw . . . [but] no self-portrait of me is in existence. I am not interested in myself as the “subject of a painting.” I am interested rather in other people, women in particular, and even more in other subjects. I am convinced that as a human being I am not particularly interesting. . . . I am not at ease with the spoken word or the written word, even when it comes to expressing something about my work or myself. When I have to write even the simplest of letters, I feel a sense of fear that is like seasickness.

In the psychoanalytic age of Sigmund Freud, this statement is curiously disengenuous, almost begging for dissection rather than introspection.

Klimt was awarded the Golden Order of Merit from Austrian emperor Joseph in 1888 and then the first Emperor’s Prize in 1890 for the watercolor Auditorium in the Old Burgtheater (1888). Klimt also painted the Vienna Burgtheater spandrels with Classical details, including images of Athena, who became the icon of artists who considered Klimt their inspirational leader. In 1897 these artists left the Society of Fine Artists in Vienna and founded the Vienna Secession. The Secession’s journal, Ver Sacrum (sacred spring), showcased their artistic philosophy.

Klimt also was awarded a gold medal for his unfinished painting, Philosophy (1900), at the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1900, even after the work had been publicly criticized in Vienna by eighty-seven professors in a petition. Klimt was awarded a gold medal for The Three Ages (1905) at the International Art Exhibition in Rome in 1908 and likewise in Rome for his Life and Death (1908-1911) in 1912. In 1912, he was made president of the Vienna Künstlerbund (Artists’ Union), which he had joined in 1906.

Several of Klimt’s female subjects are worthy of special note, namely three from his so-called golden phase. His Pallas Athene of 1898 is one of the most arresting images of Athena in modern mythology, carefully composed to draw from objects like Greek vase paintings and from antiquities like Corinthian helmets in Vienna museums. The painting exquisitely alludes to Homer’s Iliad in its grim and grey-eyed goddess, who is scarier than the monster Medusa at her golden breast. His Judith of 1901 is remarkable for its evocation of a Jewish heroine who appears to have come directly from a sexual encounter with a look on her face of bliss. The work is combined with great sophistication in its use of Assyrian relief motif from Nineveh’s friezes as a background.

Taking his unleashed sensuality to extremes, Klimt portrays his Danae of 1907-1908 the mythological sequestered virgin impregnated by Zeus in the form of golden light finding its way through a keyhole in the very act of ravishment by the god, with her flushed face, wild and wet hair, and spasms of abandonment with fingers clutching at the moment of ecstasy. This mythical realism did not come without a price. By 1917, Klimt had been denied a professorship four times by the ministry in Vienna but was elected as an honorary member of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

Klimt’s Vienna socialite portraits also suggest he had romantic liaisons with more than one of the women, although it is not easy to identify who indeed shared his life. Adele Bauer-Bloch, Emilie Flöge, Sonja Knips, Serena Lederer, Marie Henneberg, Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein, Fritza Riedler, Elizabeth Bachoven-Echt, Friedericke Beer, Eugenia Primavesi, Amalie Zuckerekandl, Helline Gallia, and Johanna Staude were just a few of Vienna’s leading ladies and other women who were his sitters.

In 1918, at the age relatively young age of fifty-five, Klimt had a stroke. For days he was unable to go to his studio. While he was paralyzed, burglars broke into his studio and discovered something that some Viennese found astonishing yet confirmed suspicions for others about Klimt’s voyeurism, of which he had been frequently accused. Unfinished paintings in Klimt’s studio showed a series of women, some of whom were splayed out naked with more detail than was considered acceptable. Klimt had been gradually painting layers of clothes on some of the nudes, explicitly visible in his unfinished The Bride (1917-1918). This startling revelation made many wonder whether many of Klimt’s female portraits might have started out as nudes. The sensationalism and wildfires of gossip this stirred in Vienna caused many of his female sitters to strongly deny such allegations, while other women may have welcomed the notoriety in avant-garde Viennese circles. It was no surprise that when Klimt’s will was read after his death in February, 1918, paternity claims followed by the mothers of fourteen children, all claiming Klimt as their father.

Significance

Klimt’s legacy far beyond subtle scholarship or blatant eroticism was already assured at his death. His reputation for fastidious layering and for integrating orientalism into his art, especially the preciosity of Japanese textile patterns and gold leaf, made Klimt a pioneer of twentieth century art.

As a Symbolist, Klimt was a careful student of myth iconography. He will be remembered for pioneering fin-de-siècle changes that ushered in a jaded new age by his Vienna Secession, for his erotic and dreamy paintings, for mastering colors and landscape, and for his brilliant reshaping of the human form in novel ways.

Bibliography

Comini, Alessandra. Gustav Klimt. New York: Braziller, 1981. Entertaining and urbane commentary with droll, engaging biographical data about the reception of Klimt and the perceived eroticism of his art in often-scandalized Vienna.

Dobai, Johannes. Gustav Klimt Landscapes. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988. Emphasizes his many vibrant landscapes, which moved his art beyond Expressionist color. Also explores how Klimt used aspects of pointillism and even cubism.

Fliedl, Gottfried. Gustav Klimt. New York: Taschen, 1989. Encyclopedic array of his art as a reflection of his life. Klimt the person is deftly reported, as is Klimt the revolutionary artist.

Frodl, Gerbert. Klimt. New York: Konecky & Konecky, Editions du Chěne, Hachette Livre, 1992. Great range of details about his paintings and very informative about how Klimt fit into Viennese society. Extensive bibliography.

Hunt, Patrick. “Gustav Klimt’s Pallas Athene: Eyes of a Goddess. ” In Philolog. Stanford, Calif., 2006. An online article on one specific painting exemplifying Klimt’s exquisite, studious attention to mythological detail. Available at http://traumwerk.stanford.edu.

Metzger, Rainer. Gustav Klimt: Drawings and Watercolors. London: Thames & Hudson, 2006. Although mostly about his media beyond painting, this book also provides an excellent chronology of his life in an appendix, with many photographs of Vienna, his colleagues, and seminal events.

Neret, Gilles. Gustav Klimt, 1862-1918. New York: Taschen, 2000. Valuable addition to the Taschen Basic Art paperback series, with outstanding color plates.

Partsch, Susanna. Gustav Klimt: Painter of Women. London: Prestel, 2006. A book about Klimt’s portraits of women and the women in his life. Written by a woman, making it more interesting and sympathetic than had it been written by male art critics and historians. Especially useful for Klimt’s deep relationship with Emilie Flöge, likely the most important woman in his life.