Gustav KLIMT and his 5 most important works

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) is one of the references within the modernist movement of the Viennese secession, being also its co-founder and first president. A Symbolist painter of Austrian origin characterized by its peculiarities, its prestige and for being one of the most decorative painters greats of the 20th century, developing their own style, loaded with eroticism, eclectic, full of fantasy and richness.

In this lesson from unPROFESOR.com we offer you which are the most important works of Gustav Klimt and the basic characteristics of his artistic style.

Index

1. Characteristics of Gustav Klimt's works
2. The Auditorium of the Old Burgtheater: one of Gustav Klimt's works
3. Pallas Athenea (1898)
4. Medicine (1900-1901), a very prominent work by Kimt
5. Adele Bloch-Bauer (1903-1907), the best work of Klimt
6. The Kiss (1907-1908), one of Klimt's most important works

• Klimt was decorative painter dedicated to the beautification of buildings with reliefs and historical scenes and figures. An aesthetic that led to his paintings on canvas, becoming a
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  exponent of the equality between the decorative arts and the fine arts.
• He was one of the founders of the Vienna Secession, in 1897, being chosen presiente by the rebellious and groundbreaking personality of him. His international fame as the most famous Art Nouveau painter contributed to the initial success of the Secession, but also to his decline when he left it in 1905.
• Although at present its artwork is iconic and very popular, at the time part of his works were considered obscene for their high erotic content.
• His work is very personal and unique, even today, the Golden Phase of it being characterized by the use of gold and silver leaf in the style of Byzantine mosaics.

Among the most outstanding works of Gustav Klimt is The Auditorium of the Old Burgtheater (1888-89), the beginnings of Klimt's pictorial career.

This was one of the most important commissions of the beginning of Klimt's career. The Vienna city council asked the painter to paint some pictures of the old Burgtheater, the city's opera, built in 1741 and demolished in that year 1888.

Klimt chose to capture the layout of the opera boxes, a somewhat original choice, but significant from an architectural point of view. A work of academic style, typical of Klimt's early works and in which the influence of Hans makart.

Another aspect of interest is the detail and virtuosity of Klimt by introducing in the work the portraits of all those people who asked him to include them in the boxes. Thus, the play is not only a memory of what the theater was like, but of the political, cultural and economic elites of the city: more than 150 individuals in total. Members of the audience include the Prime Minister of Austria, the Mayor of Vienna, the surgeon Theodor Billroth, composer Johannes Brahms and the Emperor's mistress, actress Katherina Schratt.

Although the secessionists had as a principle breaking with previous artistic traditions, their relationship with the past was not so simple. Thus, both he and other members of secessionism were inspired by Greco-Roman mythical and allegorical figures and stories and of other ancient civilizations.

In this case, Klimt reinterprets the figure of the Greco-Roman goddess with soft colors and with a tendency to abstraction, a style to which he will join when he leaves Secessionism. In this work, Klimt offers a powerful and imposing image of Athena, showing the goddess as enveloped in a mist and with an androgynous appearance. He dresses her in a military outfit that identifies her as a warrior and protector of the city of Athens, masculine qualities, while she shows her long and fine hair as a sign of her feminine side. In her hand she holds a nude figure of Nike, the representation of victory.

In that fog a representation of the oneiric, connecting the work with the work of Sigmund Freud. Thus, the work would be the embodiment of the ideal of a powerful woman, object of male desire, as well as of the woman who yearns to dress as a man to achieve a status of power.

In 1894, the Ministry of Culture commissioned Klimt to paint the new Great Hall of the University of Vienna. Klimt's work consisted of painting three monumental canvases on the themes of Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence, respectively. When Klimt began painting the canvases in 1898 he had already joined the Secession and abandoned naturalism. Of the three works, Medicine was the canvas that generated the most controversy.

Medicine shows to Hygeia, the mythological daughter of the god of medicine, located in the lower center of the canvas and identified by a serpent and the glass of Lethe. Above Hygeia rises a tall column of light, to the right of which rises a web of naked figures entwined with the skeleton of Death. On the other side of the column of light floated a naked woman whose pelvis was tilted forward, while beneath her feet floated a baby wrapped in tulle. This composition generated a multitude of criticisms accusing Klimt of making a pornographic work, without referring to any medical topic. The attitude of rejection with which Klimt's works were received led the painter to buy back the three works in 1905.

Klimt's work shows the ambiguity of human life, simultaneously representing birth and death. The rejection of Klimt's work demonstrates how, despite the great strides that the Secession had made over the years Since its founding, the movement had failed to reverse conservative attitudes toward modern art in Vienna.

For Klimt, this was all a definite humiliation and public rejection, something for which he did not exhibit in Vienna. for five years after 1903, and he resigned from official assignments, agreeing only to take on assignments private. These three paintings, like many works by Klimt, were confiscated by the Nazis and cremated in May 1945. inside Schloss Immendorf, the Lower Austrian castle where they had been stored, by SS troops in withdrawal.

This is one of the Klimt's most famous works for being one of the most notorious art theft cases of those carried out by the Nazis. Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of the Viennese banker and sugar magnate Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, she was one of his favorite muses, serving as a model for several other paintings, including his famous Judith I (1901). Although Klimt was rumored to have been romantically involved with many of the women he painted, the exact nature of his relationship with Adele Bloch-Bauer is unknown.

In this canvas a dissolution of reality breaking through to the purest abstraction. Thus, although Klimt represents Adele Bloch-Bauer seated, it is almost impossible to discern the shape of the chair or separate the shapes of her clothing from the bottom of it. Klimt was largely unconcerned about depicting the character of his model, let alone providing the location and context. The use of gold and silver leaf It shows the high value and quality of the jewelry Adele wears, as well as the depth of love from her husband, who commissioned her painting.

The work is framed within the Klimt's "Golden Phase" of the first decade of the twentieth century, in which he used dozens of gold patterns and metal tones in his paintings to add sumptuousness and luxury to his works. A technique that connects with the Byzantine mosaics in the Basilica of San Vital in Ravenna, Italy, which Klimt visited in December 1903. Many of these mosaics use a similar flat gold background and depict the Byzantine Empress Theodora. Klimt's depiction of the choker worn by Adele Bloch-Bauer in this portrait is inspired by these mosaics. Art historians also point to Egyptian influences on the shape of eyes and the dress of Bloch-Bauer, while the spirals resemble designs from ancient Mycenae and Greece classical.

As the Bloch-Bauer were Jewish, Ferdinand's assets were looted by the Nazis after the annexations of Austria and western Czechoslovakia in 1938. The Nazis installed the painting in the Galerie Belvedere in Austria. Ferdinand died in 1946, but not before delivering the paintings of him confiscated from him, including this and five other works by Klimt, to his nephews. Among them was Maria Altmann. She filed a lawsuit in 2000 to recover the paintings.

The case had enormous media coverage and reached the Supreme Court of the United States, with the paintings being returned to the Bloch-Bauer family in 2006. That June, Altmann sold this work to American cosmetic collector and mogul Ronald S Lauder for $ 135 million, a record price paid for any painting. Lauder delivered the painting to the Neue Galerie of German and Austrian Art in New York, where it is currently exhibited.

The kiss is one of the Klimt's most sensual and popular works, and probably the most reproduced work of him. It is also one of the key paintings of the so-called Klimt's "Golden Phase", a phase that extends approximately from 1903-09, and is considered an excellent example of Art Nouveau painting.

The work represents a couple embracing on the edge of a meadow, represented by the luminous flower pattern, like a kind of quilt spread under their bodies. The construction of the composition suggests a high degree of familiarity with the Arts and Crafts movement. Thus, the flat tile pattern of the meadow and the clothing of the figures resemble the fabrics produced by William Morris in the late 19th century.

The use of materials from gold and silver leaf shows the high degree of specialization reached by Klimt, recalling medieval illuminated manuscripts, although it is much more precious and more akin to Byzantine art, like the gold fields for the mosaics he had seen in Ravenna in 1903.

Furthermore, while Morris and medieval sources use precious materials to exalt God's Word or great literature, Klimt he uses them to sanctify the nature of human relationships and the bond between lovers, a key theme in Art Nouveau. Thus, the kiss embodies a universal and timeless vision of romantic love.

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