Gustav Klimt (Baumgarten, July 14, 1862 - Alsergrund, February 6, 1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter, and one of the most prestigious representatives of the modernist movement of the Viennese Secession.
Klimt painted canvases and murals with a very ornate personal style, which also manifested through craft objects, such as those collected in the Gallery of the Viennese Secession. Intellectually attuned to a certain Romantic ideology, Klimt found in the female nude one of his most recurrent sources of inspiration.
His works are endowed with an intense sensual energy, reflected with particular clarity in his numerous sketches and pencil sketches, in some ways heirs to the tradition of erotic drawings by Rodin and Ingres.
At the beginning of his artistic career, he was a successful painter of architectural decorations in a conventional manner. When he began to develop a more personal style, his work was the subject of controversy that culminated when the paintings he produced around 1900 for the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna were criticized as pornographic.
He subsequently accepted no further public commissions, but achieved 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 colleague, Egon Schiele.
Biography of Gustav Klimt
Youth and education
Gustav Klimt was born on July 14, 1862, in a small town, Baumgarten, near Vienna, the second of seven children - three sons and four daughters. From childhood, the three sons showed artistic inclinations, which they may have inherited from both their father, Ernst Klimt (1833-1892), who was a gold engraver, and their mother, Anna Klimt (née Finster), whose frustrated hobby was music.
Klimt lived in relative poverty for most of his childhood, since as an immigrant family, work was as scarce as opportunities for social advancement. It was therefore only thanks to his talent that in 1876, at the age of fourteen, he received a scholarship to study at the Kunstgewerbeschule, the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, where he would train until 1883 as a painter and interior decorator.
His teachers were Michael Rieser, Ludwing Minnigerode and Karl Hrachowina. Klimt admired and revered the then fashionable painter, Hans Makart, and willingly submitted to the dictates of a classicist artistic education. That is why his early work can be considered academic. In 1877 his younger brother Ernst - who would eventually become an engraver, like his father - was also admitted to the school.
The two brothers, with the company of their mutual friend Franz Matsch, began to work together: By 1880 they were already managing modest commissions as a collective calling themselves the "Company of Artists," collaborating as their teacher's assistants on the decoration of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
Klimt began his individual career as an interior painter in large public buildings on the Ringstrasse, already developing some allegorical themes that later became a distinctive feature of his work.
In 1888, Klimt received the Golden Order of Merit from Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria for his work on the murals in the Burgtheater in Vienna. He was made an honorary member of the universities of Munich and Vienna, and by the time his father and brother Ernst died in 1892, Klimt was able to bear the financial burden of his relatives.
The family tragedy also weighed heavily on his artistic expression, and marked the beginning of the definition of his personal style. In the early 1890s, Klimt also met Emilie Flöge, who apparently put up with the artist's constant love affairs and would become his companion until the end of his life.
The sexual component of this relationship has been the subject of some dispute, although it is documented that Klimt had at least 14 children during this relationship.
The Viennese Secession
Klimt became one of the founding members - and president - of the Wiener Sezession, a group of artists founded in 1897, and of the temporary collective Ver Sacrum (the 'Sacred Spring'). The Sezession had emerged as an independent alternative to the artists promoted by the Viennese Academy - of which Klimt himself had been a member in his youth.
Fragment of Beethoven's Frieze.
Among its objectives were the promotion of young artists, the exhibition of works produced abroad, and the publication of a review of members' major works. Unlike most avant-garde groups, the group never wrote a manifesto, nor was it defined by a particular stylistic direction: its members included naturalists, realists, and symbolists.
The group found some government support - although its works were generally detested - and was able to build a permanent exhibition hall on a site provided by the authorities. The Sezession artists took Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and justice, as their symbol. Klimt, who made a rather radical approach to the image of the goddess in 1898, was a member of this group until 1908.
In 1894, Klimt had been commissioned to create three paintings to decorate the ceiling of the Aula Magna of the University of Vienna. Unfinished until the end of the century, these three works - Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence - were heavily criticized for their radical approach and their very representation, which some considered "pornographic".
Klimt adapted the classical form of allegory and its conventional symbolism, shaping it with his own plastic language, openly sexual and with provocative overtones. The outcry was general: politicians protested, but also personalities related to the art world and public morals.
The university finally decided not to place Klimt's works, and Klimt would no longer accept commissions from then on. Unfortunately, the three works were destroyed by the SS during their removal in May 1945. In 1899, Klimt confirmed his style:
Provocative and full of disturbing energy, his Nuda Veritas - the "Naked Truth" - was a step forward in his personal aesthetics, but it was also a declaration of principles, almost a challenge, addressed mainly to the more conservative critics of his work: The crude frontal nude of a woman holding an allegorical "mirror of truth" was crowned with a well-known sentence from Schiller:
"If you cannot please everyone with your merits and your art, please few. To please many is bad."
Schiller
In 1902, Klimt completed his work on the Beethoven Frieze in time for the 14th exhibition of the Viennese Secessionists, which had been organized as a tribute to the composer, and which featured a monumental polychrome sculpture by Max Klinger. Intended for temporary display, the frieze was painted directly on the wall with a light technique.
After the exhibition, however, the frieze was preserved, although it was not on public display again until 1986. The following year Klimt traveled through Italy, visiting Florence, Venice and Ravenna, and discovering the Byzantine mosaics in the churches of San Vitale and San Apollinaris.
Then began what some critics have interpreted as the stage of artistic maturity of the painter: freed from public commissions, Klimt had begun in 1890 to travel with the Flöge family to Lake Attersee, where he made numerous landscapes. These works became an exception in the corpus of Klimt, who had always been devoted to the figure with energetic devotion:
"There is no self-portrait of me. I am not interested in my own personality as the subject of a painting, but rather in other people, especially women, other appearances... I am convinced that as a person I am not particularly interesting."
Gustav Klimt
Klimt was an energetic and rapturous painter, and his own relatives commented in amazement on his dedication:
"Every evening he would come home, take his supper in silence and go to bed...When he had rested, he would resume work with such impetus that we often thought the flames of his genius would consume him alive....."
Stylistically, the landscapes produced during that season were characterized by the same refined ornamental design and by an emphatic use of compositional motifs. The pictorial space appears "flattened" in such an emphatic way that some critics have pointed to the possibility that Klimt painted them using some kind of spyglass.
The 'golden period' and critical acclaim
Klimt's "golden period" was determined by a progressive critical acclaim and great commercial success. Many of his paintings from this period incorporate gold leaf into the paint, although this was a medium Klimt had already used sporadically since 1898 (Pallas Athene) and his first version of Judith, from 1901.
The Kiss, 1907-1908. The painter's best known painting. Oil/canvas. Österreichische Galerie Belvedere.
After returning from his Italian trip, Klimt participated in the decoration of the sumptuous Stoclet Palace, home of an opulent Belgian magnate. This building would become the synthesis of Central European art nouveau. Klimt's contribution - represented by The Fulfillment and The Expectation - signified the climax of his creative energy, and as he himself stated, "possibly the last step in my development of ornamentation".
The most notable works produced at this stage were however the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) and The Kiss (1907-1908). At the same time, Klimt painted portraits of various ladies of Viennese high society, usually wrapped in furs.
It is possible that many of the models that Flöge wears in some of the photographs taken by the author were designed by the artist himself. As can be seen in many photographs, Klimt used to wear a tunic and sandals when he was at home.
He led a rather simple life, completely absorbed by his work and family, and except for a few encounters with other Sezession artists, Klimt tended to avoid society gatherings and intellectual "café" circles. Despite his image as a libertine, Klimt also conducted his active sex life discreetly, and although he surrounded himself with female models of very different social status, he was never personally involved in any public scandal.
Attracted by his great fame, some clients who came to his house often discovered that Klimt could afford to be very selective before accepting a commission.
Once a commission was accepted, the artist would begin his particular method of working, after long meditations and even longer model posing sessions. The overtly erotic nature of his works was often "softened" by an allegorical, or symbolic, approach, which made them somehow more admissible to the public opinion of the Viennese bourgeoisie.
Klimt was never noted for his theoretical character. He wrote hardly anything about his artistic vision or his methods. Similarly, he never kept a diary, and his correspondence is limited to a few postcards sent to Flöge.
Old age and posthumous fame
In 1911, thanks to The Life and Death, Klimt is awarded the first prize at the Universal Exhibition in Rome. In 1915, his mother, Anna, died. Three years later, after a heart attack, pneumonia and the flu of 1918, Klimt died. The artist, on his deathbed, asked for Emilie Flöge, twelve years younger than him and with whom he never wanted to marry.
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, sold in 2006 for a record $135 million. Neue Galerie, New York.
In his studio he left a large number of unfinished works. A considerable number of his works were confiscated by the Nazi dictatorship. At the advance of the enemy troops, and seeing that his works would become spoils of war, they decided to burn the castle where they remained confiscated.
Klimt's works have broken some records at art auctions. In November 2003, an Attersee landscape was sold for $29 million, a figure that was soon eclipsed by the final prices of other of his works.
In 2006, the first portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer was sold at the Neue Galerie in New York for $135 million, surpassing the record set by Picasso's Boy with a Pipe (1905) (sold on May 5, 2004 for $104 million). On August 7, 2006, Christie's bidding house announced the auction of a new lot of works by Klimt, works that had been recovered by Maria Altman and her heirs after a long lawsuit that confronted them with the Austrian government.
Finally, the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II was auctioned in November 2006 -becoming the third most expensive work of art in history-, the Apple Tree, I (ca. 1912) was sold for 33 million, the Birch Forest (1903) for more than 40 million dollars, and the Houses at Unterach on Lake Atter (1916) for another 31 million. Altogether, the five pieces represent a total value of $327 million.
Edgar Degas's Recurring style and themes
Klimt's work has been identified with sumptuous decoration based on gilding and brightly colored ornamental elements, but also with concealed phallic forms that indicate the character of the drawings that inspired them.
In the first version of Judith, for example, but also in The Kiss and, above all, in the Danae of 1907 and in Girlfriends or Two Friends, abstract elements of an unmistakable sexual character appear.
Being women one of Klimt's most recurrent themes, it is logical that the artist represented many of the facets of the female character, although he felt a special predilection for an aggressive and dominant type of woman that could be identified with the iconic model of the femme fatale.
Art historians agree in pointing out the eclectic character of his pictorial style; and references to the art of ancient Egypt, Mycenaean culture, classical Greece and Byzantine art, among others, have been noted.
A man of classical training, Klimt nevertheless had no qualms about showing his enthusiasm for the art of medieval artists -like Durero- or exotic artists -like the artists of the Japanese Rinpa school-.
His mature works are characterized by a rejection of his naturalistic beginnings, and so it has been pointed out the progressive development of symbolic or abstract motifs that emphasized the freedom of spirit that permeated all the artistic avant-gardes of the early twentieth century.
Similarly, the value of the line in his work is significant. His dramatic compositions -sometimes using strange points of view, vertical planes and atypical cuts- underline the innovative character of his plastic art, and anticipate the expressive value of the line that would characterize later expressionism.
Drawings of Edgar Degas
In 1963, the Albertina Museum in Vienna began researching Gustav Klimt's drawings. The research project Gustav Klimt. Die Zeichnungen, has since been associated with intensive exhibition and publication activity.
Between 1980 and 1984, Alice Strobl published the three-volume catalog raisonné, which records and describes all of Gustav Klimt's drawings known at that time in chronological order. A companion volume was published in 1989.
The following year, Strobl transferred her work to art historian and curator Marian Bisanz-Prakken, who had assisted her since 1975 in determining and classifying the works and who continues the research project to this day. Since 1990, Marian Bisanz-Prakken has redefined, documented and scientifically processed some 400 more drawings.
This makes the Albertina in Vienna the only institution in the world that has been scientifically examining and classifying the artist's works for half a century. The research project now includes information on more than 4,300 works by Gustav Klimt.
Legacy of Edgar Degas
Klimt's work had an enormous influence on the entire Viennese Secession group. In his role as leader of the group, Klimt was not only a powerful influence on artists such as Egon Schiele, but he sought to support the work of these young talents with the institution of the Kunsthalle, in 1917, with which he sought to prevent the exodus of artists abroad.
Retrato de Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein 180 x 90 cm (1905) Neue Pinakothek, Múnich.
His relationship with the Viennese aristocracy and intelligentsia allowed him close contact with the most important personalities of the continent, such as Oskar Kokoschka and Alma Mahler, among others.
His unmistakable aesthetics, and a certain decadent aroma with which his work is usually identified, have made him an inescapable reference of contemporary fashion and aesthetics.
The astronomical auction prices of his works prove, in a way, that Klimt's commercial success has not waned, a century after his death. Films have also been made about his life, including one starring John Malkovich, which premiered on January 28, 2006 during the International Film Festival of Rotterdam (Holland).
The 'Golden Coin' of painting
Because of his imposing artistic legacy and his family connection to gold engraving, Gustav Klimt has been a frequent subject of artists' medals and collector's coins. The most recent is a gold coin stamped in 100 euros, minted on November 5, 2003. On the reverse, the coin shows Klimt in his studio, with two unfinished works on easels.
Theft and recovery of the painting Portrait of a Lady
It was one of the most sought-after stolen paintings, after its spectacular disappearance without a trace from the Ricci Oddi Gallery in Piacenza (central Italy) in 1997 went around the world. Now, Gustav Klimt's "Portrait of a Lady" has been discovered in the museum itself.
Retrato de una Dama, robado en 1997, y encontrado en el 2019.
During cleaning and renovation work on the outer wall of the museum, in a cavity protected by a metal sheet and covered by ivy over the years, workers found a black garbage bag with the painting inside.
The last tests are missing, but the director of the Ricci Oddi Gallery himself, Massimo Ferrari, is sure that it is the Gustav Klimt painting that 22 years and 9 months ago mysteriously disappeared just before its transfer for an exhibition.
On the back of the painting, which was worth around $60 million at the time, the stamps of the exhibitions in which the work had been shown in the past have appeared, Italian media explained. It is believed that the thieves put it there to later recover it at a second time, but the international outcry caused by the theft made them desist.
The theft of Klimt's "Lady" took place in February 1997 and was so spectacular and mysterious that it ended up in newspapers all over the world and in these 22 years there have been several scene hits and false leads, but never did investigators come even the slightest bit closer to who might have stolen the painting.
During the confusion of the transfer of the works for an exhibition in the Gothic Palace of Piacenza dedicated to Klimt, the work disappeared and the frame of the painting appeared outside one of the skylights of the gallery. At first it was thought that the "acrobat thieves" might have entered and left the museum through this narrow skylight in broad daylight, since a security system with alarms was in place at night.
The gallery guards were investigated, but the accusations were dismissed by the examining magistrate for lack of evidence. Even a known picture thief was investigated, who admitted to having stolen the work, but the police never believed him; it was also thought that it had been stolen for satanic rituals.
In another of the false leads it was thought that it was part of the so-called "treasure" that the former Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi took to Tunisia to escape justice. On April 1, 1997, the police intercepted at the border between Italy and France a package destined to Craxi in which they found a supposed Klimt, but it turned out to be a fake.
It was also assumed that the theft would have had to be a commissioned work by a collector, since the work was too well known to try to sell it, they said at the time. It had been the protagonist of a great discovery ten months before its theft, because thanks to an art student, Claudia Maga, 18, it was learned that the painting hid underneath another painting by the Austrian painter.
The young girl found while studying Klimt's works a strong resemblance between "The Lady" and another painting, the "Portrait of a Young Lady", believed lost since 1912 and depicting a girl with a scarf and a hat. Both young ladies looked very much alike: the same look, the same smile and the same mole on the left cheek.
Among the various versions that exist, it is believed that the painter fell in love with a young girl and used the existing painting to paint a new one with speed. The work has been transferred to a secret and protected place and the magistracy will appoint a group of experts to verify its authenticity and put an end to a mystery that began 22 years ago.