Gustav Klimt - the gold boy from Vienna

Gustav Klimt is in conversation everywhere, on his 150th anniversary of death on July 14, even Google devoted a doodle to the artist, who is currently in such coveted artists, a specially designed Google logo.

Of course, this Doodle Klimts picture “The Kiss” integrated, the picture that has already had a phenomenal success story as a favorite printing for furniture store art and can currently also be acquired as an imprint on an ostrich egg or as a template for coloring pages.

With the uninhibited marketing of the pictures accentuated with gold, which often also show lovers and flowers, Klimt became a symbol of kitsch for design purists in the living room. A role that in reality does not even do justice to him.

Most of Klimt's work does not contain gold, the golden phase begins in 1906 and ends in 1907, a really small excerpt in an artistic activity that lasts over four decades.

Until the beginning of the golden phase, Klimt had already had a career behind him and the first radical tendencies that should make him one of the guides of the art of the new century: at the age of 14 he began studying at the Vienna School of Applied Sciences in 1876, and in 1883 he moved into the first studio.

During this time he made Sgraffiti (stucco technology with wall paintings) for museum buildings, helped the artistic design of commands and theater buildings, painted ceiling pictures and murals. Towards the end of the 1880s, the studio community of the Klimtbrüder and 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 the imperial award rewarded with 400 ducats.

In the following decade, Klimt is increasingly moving away from the traditional painting style of the academies, the first step in search of his own style was in 1891 to join the "Cooperative Artist Vienna" .

 

From this time, Klimt is trapped in the conflict between anti -innovative tradition and the pursuit of progress in modern art. In 1897 Klimt became co -founder of the Viennese “Secession” , this artist association wants freedom for art and artists, without state interference.

At work for the Secession, Klimt continues to develop his increasingly expressionist, sometimes ornamental and almost mosaic -like form of expression, which was already felt in the faculty pictures for Vienna University, which had just begun. In 1900 one of these ceiling paintings received a gold medal at the Paris World Exhibition.

In the Vienna homeland, his new work is increasingly triggering sharp rejection in the conservative circles, the debates about the faculty images developed into a public dispute until the climate finally refused to deliver these works to the Ministry of Education and the fee already paid back. In 1905, disputes of opinion also led to the division of the Secession and Klimt's exit.

“Golden Period” with the portrait of the “Fritza Riedler” , the introduction of the gold was inspired by his trips to Italy in the early 1900s.

However, the entire presentation has already been influenced by its acquaintance with pioneering renewal of art such as Auguste Rodin. This golden period was only very short: in 1907 this phase ended, after which the climate seems to be judged alone today, with the portrait of the Adele Bloch Bauer I (and the kiss, his painting, which is now over-famous, is of course also part of it).

The following work develops further and further towards modernity, in dialogue and in the discussion with other time sizes of art. In 1907 Klimt met the Expressionist Egon Schiele , in 1908/09 he organized a forum for modern Viennese art "Kunstschau"

In 1911 he received a first prize for his controversial painting "Death and Life" at the international art exhibition in Rome, an incredibly imaginative composition with clearly surreal elements.

In 1916, the “Bund of Austrian Artists” took part in an exhibition in the Berlin Secession together with Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka and Anton Faistauer. In addition to Schiele and Kokoschka, Klimt was the artist, who had done the most to ensure that the Imperial-Kleinsbußliche Vienna also broke into artistic modernism.

So Klimt did not paint kitsch, but brought provocations and radical innovations to the art of the time. With a completely new and clearly thematized relationship with eroticism and sometimes with a strong shot irony: The “goldfish” from 1902 were the clims of the traditionalists' criticism of the faculty pictures - the smiling laughing nymph turns the viewer bluntly.

Do you still have old art books at home that show more of Klimt than the well -known kiss and its golden companions? If you set these works on Kunstplaza , there are certainly enthusiasts who are happy to get to know other works from this contradictory artist!

You can browse numerous works of art from Gustav Klimt on the following pin board: