Gustav Klimt

I

Introduction

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), Austrian painter and cofounder of the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop) and the Vienna Sezession. The Sezession was a group of artists who brought modernism to Austrian art. Klimt’s art served as a bridge between the artistic styles of the late 19th century and the emerging style of Viennese expressionism in the years before World War I (1914-1918). His painting style combined many influences, including Jugendstil (German for “youth style), the German version of the international art nouveau movement; Asian and Byzantine art; and symbolism, a late 19th-century movement that sought to evoke feelings and ideas rather than describe nature and objects (see Symbolist Movement).

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Early Years

Klimt was born near Vienna, Austria, on July 14, 1862. The son of an unsuccessful engraver, he grew up in poverty. In 1876, at the age of 14, he entered the School of Applied Arts in Vienna. There he learned various techniques but decided to continue his studies in painting. His early work consisted primarily of large murals for theaters and other public buildings. In 1893 Klimt received a commission to paint three murals for the conservative University of Vienna, which he carried out from 1899 to 1903. The murals represented the traditional disciplines of philosophy, medicine, and jurisprudence with realistically painted nude figures. Their nudity, along with the ambiguous spatial fog in which the figures floated, shocked his patrons who declared the murals to be obscene. The scandal that resulted led Klimt to abandon his early ambition to create public art. (The university murals were destroyed by the Nazis in 1945, during World War II.)

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Vienna Sezession

In 1897 Klimt and other young artists “seceded” from Vienna’s official and tradition-bound art academy, and founded the Vienna Sezession; Klimt served as Sezession president until 1905. Architect Joseph Olbrich designed the Sezession Building (1898-1899), which served as an exhibition space for the group in Vienna. In 1902 the Sezession held an exhibition honoring composer Ludwig van Beethoven, and Klimt created a series of wall paintings known as the Beethoven Frieze for the building.

The Beethoven Frieze interpreted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with its closing chorus, “Ode to Joy,” and embodied Klimt’s belief that love and art were the keys to life. Its stiff, forward-facing figures have the quality of icons, a quality strengthened by the artist’s use of gold and jewel-like colors and patterns. These features later became prominent in Klimt’s portraits. The Beethoven Frieze was not intended to be permanent and was painted directly onto the building’s walls. Later destroyed, the murals were recreated in the Sezession Building in Vienna in the 1980s.

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IV

Wiener Werkstätte

Klimt’s motif of an embracing couple, the kiss, first appeared in the Beethoven frieze. He used it again in single canvases and in his mosaic designs for a private house, the Palais Stoclet (1905-1911), built for Belgian industrialist Adolphe Stoclet in Brussels. Klimt worked on the Palais Stoclet in collaboration with architect Josef Hoffmann and designer Kolomon Moser. Their association in the Sezession had resulted in 1903 in the formation of the Wiener Werkstätte, a collective dedicated to producing high-quality domestic products and unified interior design. The sumptuous décor of the Palais Stoclet, including Klimt’s mosaic-lined dining room, was the Werkstätte’s masterpiece.

When the Werkstätte produced too few commissions to keep Klimt busy with decorative projects, he turned to painting landscapes and portraits of society figures. The jewel-like tones, the flat, unshadowed surfaces, and the sinuous, curling lines and patterns seen in his mosaics and the Beethoven Frieze also characterize these later works. Indeed, the faces in his portraits almost disappear in the dense decorative patterns that accumulate on the picture surface; gilded cubes encase the heads like flattened crowns. It was an idiosyncratic approach to painting Vienna’s wealthiest art patrons. Klimt seldom exhibited his work in his later years, but he supported younger Austrian artists such as Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka in their battles against censorship. Klimt died on February 6, 1918, after a stroke.