Gustav Klimt – The Golden Boy from Vienna

Gustav Klimt is currently a hot topic everywhere; on the 150th anniversary of his death on July 14th, even Google dedicated a Doodle, a specially designed Google logo, to the currently highly sought-after artist.

"The Kiss" was integrated into this doodle , the image that already has a phenomenal success story as a favorite print template for furniture store art and can currently also be purchased as a print on an ostrich egg or as a template for coloring pages.

With the unrestrained marketing of his gold-accented paintings, which often also depict lovers and flowers, Klimt became, for design purists, the epitome of kitsch in the living room. A role that doesn't even remotely do him justice.

Most of Klimt's work contains no gold; the golden phase begins in 1906 and ends in 1907, a truly small segment in an artistic career spanning over four decades.

By the time his golden phase began, Klimt had already enjoyed a successful career and hinted at the first radical tendencies that would make him one of the leading figures of the art of the new century: He began his studies at the Vienna School of Applied Arts in 1876 at the age of 14, and in 1883 he moved into his first studio.

During this time, he created sgraffito (a stucco technique with wall paintings) for museum buildings, assisted with the artistic design of pageants and theater buildings, and painted ceiling and murals. Towards the end of the 1880s, the Klimt brothers, together with Franz Matsch, designed the stairwells and the auditorium of the old Vienna Burgtheater; for this work, the artists received the Golden Cross of Merit, and Gustav Klimt was awarded the Emperor's Prize, worth 400 ducats.

In the following decade, Klimt increasingly distanced himself from the traditional painting style of the academies; the first step in the search for his own style was joining the “Association of Visual Artists of Vienna” .

 

From this time onward, Klimt was caught in the conflict between tradition's resistance to innovation and the pursuit of progress in modern art. In 1897, Klimt co-founded the Vienna Secession , an artists' association that advocated for freedom for art and artists, free from state interference.

In his work for the Secession, Klimt further developed his increasingly expressionistic, sometimes ornamental and almost mosaic-like style, which was already evident in the faculty paintings he had begun shortly before for the University of Vienna. In 1900, one of these ceiling paintings received a gold medal at the Paris World's Fair.

In his native Vienna, his new works increasingly provoked sharp rejection in conservative circles. The debates surrounding the faculty paintings escalated into a public dispute, until Klimt finally refused to hand over these works to the Ministry of Education and repaid the fee already paid. In 1905, further disagreements led to the split of the Secession and Klimt's resignation.

For Klimt, this crisis marked the beginning of his final revolt: In 1906, with the portrait of “Fritza Riedler”, he ushered in his “golden period” , the use of gold being inspired by his travels to Italy in the early 1900s.

However, his overall style was already influenced by his acquaintance with pioneering innovators in art such as Auguste Rodin. This golden period was very short: in 1907, this phase, by which Klimt now seems to be judged solely, ended with the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (and The Kiss, his now over-famous painting, naturally belongs to it as well).

Klimt's subsequent works evolved further towards modernism, in dialogue and discussion with other leading figures in the art world at the time. In 1907, he met the Expressionist Egon Schiele , and in 1908/09 he organized the "Kunstschau" (Art Show), a forum for modern Viennese art.

In 1911, he received a first prize at the International Art Exhibition in Rome for his controversial painting “Death and Life”, an incredibly imaginative composition with distinctly surreal elements.

In 1916, under his presidency, the "Association of Austrian Artists" participated in an exhibition at the Berlin Secession, together with Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, and Anton Faistauer. Alongside Schiele and Kokoschka, Klimt was thus the artist who had done the most to bring imperial, petit-bourgeois Vienna into the realm of artistic modernism.

Klimt didn't paint kitsch, but rather introduced provocations and radical innovations into the art of his time. He presented a completely new and explicitly thematized relationship to eroticism , and sometimes with a strong dose of irony: The "Goldfish" of 1902 were Klimt's response to the traditionalists' criticism of his faculty paintings – the mischievously laughing nymph quite unabashedly turns her magnificent backside to the viewer.

Do you have any old art books at home that show more of Klimt's work than the well-known Kiss and its gold-dotted companions? If you upload these works to Kunstplaza , there are sure to be enthusiasts who would be delighted to discover other pieces by this multifaceted artist!

You can browse numerous artworks by Gustav Klimt on the following pinboard: