Translated material
Gustav Klimt and Vienna Modern
The artistic leader of the Vienna modern Gustav Klimt is not represented (as far as I know) in our museums; To evaluate its scale, you must be in Vienna. A few years ago I was lucky. In fact, in Vienna I was mainly occupied by the architecture of the Viennese modern and secession as the phenomenon of the era. As for Klimt, I imagined its style in quality reproductions; As an artist, he was not close to me.
Now finally you could see Klimt's original.
Yes, and it would be strange not to see them-first of all, these are murals in the building of the Art-Historical Museum: I lived nearby and spent a lot of time in KunstHistorische. It turns out, it turns out, the splendor without pretentiousness! .. Klimt’s work with great fullness is represented in the Baroque Palace Verkhny Belveder: there I discovered the Klimt Layupian, closer to me than the women's portraits that glorified him.
Gustav Klimt was born in 1862 in Baumgarten near Vienna, in the family of an engraver in gold; This fact is often recalled due to the fact that Klimt used fragments of the thinnest sheets of gold in many of his canvases.
Klimt studied at a famous school of arts and crafts; In his youth, his ideal was the leading artist-academician Hans Makart. One of Klimt’s brothers also became an artist; Together with their friend Franz, the young people received orders for the painting of buildings, including in KunstHistorische and other buildings recently rebuilt in the ring.
In 1886, Gustav Klimt received from Emperor Franz Joseph the Order for Merit for the painting in the new building of Burgtheater. At this time, Vienna was violently built and rich; The father of the Vienna Art Nouveau in the architecture of Otto Wagner has already erected beautiful buildings, which today are fascinating simplicity and harmony.
In 1894, Klimt received an order for three large ceiling panels for the Act Hall of Vienna University: “Medicine”, “Jurisprudence” and “Philosophy”. The fulfillment of these panels was tightened before the beginning of the new century, and their reception was marked by a scandal. Klimt's works were rejected as “pornography” -and it was the mildest expression of rejection by the customer of the new style of Klimt, who far has gone from Academicism Makant. (Klimt himself was never prone to verbal design of his positions and defiantly sent him to his paintings.)
In Klimt’s biographies, this plot is usually described in all details, since it reflects the inevitable conflict of new forms in art with the “protective” positions of the state as a customer. Klimt returned the money received for the panel and since then he had never taken up state orders again. These panels of Klimt were burned by German troops in 1945, in the last days of the war, so they are known to us only by reproductions.
By the mid-1890s, Klimt was a leading figure among Viennese artists. In 1897, the Vienna Secession was founded - the Union of Masters, united by the requirements of artistic freedom; Klimt was his undoubted leader.
It is important to remember that the ideas of the secession did not at all assume the actual artistic unity of its members. It was enough to share the call of "every time -his own art, to every art -with his own freedom." These words today can be seen above the entrance to the Setzession building, built in 1898 as an exhibition hall according to the project of Joseph Maria Olbrich, a student of Otto Wagner.
The exhibition activity of the Secession was extremely intense: no matter what a month, then a new exposition. The XIV exhibition of Secession in 1902 was particularly fame. Secessions conceived this exhibition as a single work of art dedicated to Beethoven.
The interior of the house of Secession was the most neutral background: concrete structures were painted white, and the central place in the exposition was occupied by the sculpture of Beethoven's work of Max Clinger. It was for this exhibition that Gustav Klimt created his famous Beethoven Frisis. The exhibition became a memorial to the great German composer, including painting, sculpture and music - the orchestra of the Viennese opera under the leadership of Gustav Malera performed a fourth part of Beethoven's ninth symphony.
Nevertheless, Klimt, apparently, was too large an individualist to actively participate in any organization-in 1905 he left the secession. In the future, Klimt led a very closed lifestyle, concentrating mainly on portrait painting. His models were women from wealthy families - in fact, it is this side of his work that is most famous. The closest person for him was the artist and fashion designer Emilia Flege.
In addition to portraits and landscapes, Klimt's creative heritage includes a huge number of drawings -transformally in the nude genre. If you focus on three or four such drawings, you can evaluate them as an erotic Par Excellence; But if we consider a large array, it is clear that these are a professional studies. As you know, the disputes around Klimt were concentrated around the recognition/non-recognition by his erotic artist.
It seems to me that the pathos of the work of Klimt and his eroticism, his symbolism, the installation on decorativeness - all this is understandable only in the context of the cultural explosion that stands behind the phrase Viennese modern. This phenomenon is best described in the book of Shorsk [1]. A separate chapter is devoted to Klimt there, but it is useful to read, for example, about the phenomenon of the ring.
Klimt’s landscapes love me with special decorativeness-in them the image object does not dissolve in ornamental, but allows you to see a new way in a new forest or the surface of the lake.
Klimta, like many, took the Spanish in 1918. Emilia Flege, his friend and closest ally, survived both wars and went to the best world in 1952.
Klimt is well represented on the Internet, for example on the portal [2].
1. Shorsk Karl E. Vienna at the turn of the eras: politics and culture. Translation from English. -St. Petersburg, Publishing House to them. N.I. Novikova, 2001. - 512 p.