Gustav Klimt: biography of the most important painter of the Viennese Secession

He is world famous for his paintings of an almost dreamlike gold and for his figures of beautiful women who seem to have escaped from a nocturnal apparition. Indeed, the innovative and revolutionary style of Gustav Klimt, the most important painter of the call Viennese Secession, fascinated and scandalized Vienna at the end of the 19th century. The fascination, for the enigmatic beauty of his new way of painting. The scandal, due to his lack of modesty when it came to capturing the open truth on canvas or paper (as he demonstrated in the paintings for the University of Vienna), as well as his naked women in erotic attitudes that were a blow to the rigid society Are you coming to.

If you are interested in knowing the life of this genius of Art Noveau in Germany (known as Jugendstil) and leader of the so-called Secession, he continues reading. His life path, as well as his artistic creation, will not leave you indifferent.

Brief biography of Gustav Klimt, the great painter of the Secession

Gustav Klimt's imagination and creative genius led him to execute his works through various techniques: from gold leaf, perhaps his most characteristic element, to oil and tempera; Any medium was conducive to vomiting out all of his incessant creativity. The result is works that never leave the viewer indifferent, as they seem to emerge from nowhere, perhaps spectral apparitions or comings from a wonderful but ephemeral dream.

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The first steps: the “Vienna Company of Artists”

Born in July 1862 in Vienna, son of a father of Bohemian origin who was dedicated to crafts, From a very young age, the young Klimt showed an obvious interest and talent in art.. In 1876 he won a scholarship to train at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, linked to the Royal Imperial Austrian Museum of Art; With a classmate from the academy (Franz Matsch) and with his brother Ernest (who had also been admitted to it) he founded a kind of brotherhood that he baptized as the Company of Artists (Künstler-Compagnie).

The young company specialized, at first, in decorating the walls and ceilings of theaters and other buildings of the empire. Some of his most notable works (for which he was highly regarded) were his theater paintings. of Reichenberg, or the series of works that were commissioned for the decoration of the castle of Charles I of Romania.

These works of youth, although truly beautiful, have nothing to do with the style for which we know the artist. These are paintings with a clear academic influence that sometimes mix elements close to Art Noveau, but they are not, by any means, as novel and surprising as the works for which Klimt would go down in history.

From this period The series of paintings that the artist made for the volumes of Allegories and emblems (1883), commissioned by Martin Gerlach, where he represents different allegories related to art. In them we can already observe a change in the style and artistic concept of the painter, which would move him further and further away from the academy and would end up germinating in the Viennese Secession movement, a voice that rose resoundingly and energetically against the corseted art official.

The series stands out in particular for its allegory of sculpture. Following the classical tradition, Klimt presents her in the form of a young woman, naked in this case, reflecting the archetype of a seductive woman that would later permeate his paintings. The allegory of sculpture is clearly influenced by the prerafelites and for a clearly neoclassical cut, which we can see in the Greek frieze, the bust and the Spinario that accompany the woman.

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A change of style

In the mid-1890s Klimt was already experimenting with a new style. The wall paintings for the ceremony hall of the University of Vienna, commissioned by the Ministry of Imperial education, they already accused this new style that was going to be characteristic of the painter, so they are rejected. The client found the allegories of the faculties (philosophy, theology, medicine and law) too “dark”, very far from the traditional idealization of this type of representations.

The truth is that We cannot judge with our own eyes what these paintings looked like, since they sadly went up in flames in 1945., when the Immendorf Palace (50 kilometers from Vienna), where they were kept, burned. Only a few black and white photographs survived, which have allowed, by the way, to create with artificial intelligence a recreation of what the original works must have been like.

It seems that Klimt was angered by such rejection, and from then on he no longer accepted official commissions. However, his new style had already been born; The artist felt quite distant from the precepts that had led him to found the Company of Artists. In 1892, the premature death of his brother Ernest, another of the group's founders, exacerbated the gap, and in May 1897 Gustav leaves the association and together with other dissident painters founds a training independent. The Vienna Secession had just been born.

The Vienna Secession and the art of fin-de-siècle Vienna

The first exhibition of the newly founded Secession (with a sufficiently explicit name) was held in 1898, at the Vienna Horticultural Society. The new artistic group was formed, in addition to Klimt (its first president), by other artists such as Kolo Moser (1868-1918), Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956) and Joseph Maria Olbrich (1867-1908).. The latter was also the architect responsible for the famous Secession building located in Vienna, which was to host the group's exhibitions.

The Vienna Secession must be included within a much broader movement of a European nature, universally known as Art Noveau and which received various names depending on the country. Thus, it would link with German Jugendstil, Spanish Modernism or liberty In England. In general, these were movements that categorically rejected the new era of production and consumption and They leaned towards a style close to traditional craftsmanship and a mixture of styles and expressions. cultural. Despite this, the Viennese Secession is much more sober than the modernism of other latitudes, and in architecture a predominance of the straight line that advocates future rationalism can be seen.

In the specific case of our protagonist, his work Judith I, made in 1901, is very significant.

For many it represents the beginning of what is known as Klimt's “golden period”, characterized by golden backgrounds and strong symbolism. In 1902, the painter made the famous Beethoven frieze for the Secession exhibition pavilion, shortly before the start of the group's 14th exhibition and for which it is harshly criticized. The sinuosity of the flat figures and their disturbing anatomy were branded “disgusting,” and the exhibition was a failure. It was evident that the general public was not yet prepared for the blow of modernity and genius that Klimt's art represented.

Women and dreams on golden backgrounds

The female figure, sometimes eroticized, sometimes converted into an apparition or dream, is a central theme in the work of Gustav Klimt. The work Judith I, with which we have mentioned her “golden period” begins, represents a naked woman (the biblical Judith), who smiles almost lasciviously and with evident superiority. Her pearly skin is decorated with gold leaf that draws wonderful ornaments and turns the painting into a kind of apparition from the beyond, a magnificent dream of beauty, jewels and sex.

Gustav Klimt never married, but he had numerous affairs with women, mostly models who posed for his works; No less than six children are known to him by three of them. Her relationship with the female sex was special and often stormy.. Many of his drawings, direct and open-minded and certainly much more explicit than his paintings, capture the woman as an object of male sexual desire, in a way quite similar to that of his contemporary Egon Schiele (1890-1918). His way of treating the nude, brutal and realistic, brought him strong criticism during his lifetime, if not real scandals. A good example of this is The naked truth, an allegory of Truth where a naked woman with pubic hair is shown, almost life-size, which represented a real challenge to the prevailing norms of art.

We have commented that there are many women who passed through the life and bed of Gustav Klimt. But, above all of them, Emilie Flöge (1874-1952), sister of Ernest's wife, stands out. Virtually all of the artist's biographers agree that Emilie was the most important woman in the painter's life.. They met in 1891, shortly before Ernest's death, and their relationship lasted until Klimt's death in 1918, although in recent years it seems to have been more friendly than loving.

Emilie, the muse among muses

Emilie was a fundamental support for the artist. Every summer, Gustav and the Flöge family spent a few weeks at Lake Atter in Upper Austria; During those delicious stays in contact with nature, the painter's inspiration revived. The result of these vacation days are paintings of landscapes such as At Lake Attersee (1900). Emilie and Klimt shared the summer days with Helene, Emilie's sister and Ernest's widow, and Helene Louise, Klimt's niece, whose guardian he had been since the death of her brother.

Emilie and her sisters founded one of the most important and prestigious fashion salons in Vienna, the Schwestern Flöge, located on one of the busiest and most prestigious avenues in the city. Among the essential characteristics of the fashion advocated by this admirable woman is the rejection of the corset and the commitment to fantasy garments, much looser and more comfortable. Gustav Klimt portrayed Emilie in 1902 in a sumptuous dress that seems straight out of a fairy tale and that recalls, with its watery blue and its gold and silver leaf, the scales of a fish.

Klimt painted many women (among them, the famous Adele Bloch-Bauer, the protagonist of the well-known painting The golden lady), but none had as much importance in his life as Emilie Flöge. In fact, upon the artist's death in February 1918 (victim of pneumonia, complicated by a stroke that she had had a month before she left him paralyzed), she was the heir to her estate, along with her sisters.

Painter of life, love and death

Perhaps we have to attribute part of the rejection that Gustav Klimt's works caused during his lifetime to the mirror effect of his works. Klimt rudely showed life itself and, therefore, love, sex and death. These are not rugged or unpleasant works (in the expressionist style), but rather delicate golden and poetic compositions, making the veracity of their content even more overwhelming.

An example of this stark vision is one of his masterpieces, Death and Life, of which the artist made two versions. In both versions, to the left of the image we see Death, personified by a dressed skeleton, while, on the right, Life is captured through semi-naked figures that intertwine, in an almost dance. erotica. In the first version, however, death lowers its head, as if ashamed; In the second, made around 1915, she looks with ferocity not without amusement at the meat she is to take, while in her bony hands she brandishes a club, with which she will deliver the fatal blow. It is logical that the cheerful Viennese society of the fin de siècle would try to ignore such a message, almost a memento mori of contemporary times.