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Gustav Klimt
(Jul.14, 1862 Vienna - Feb.6, 1918) Austrian Oil Painting Artist Biography.
Gustav Klimt is the founder of the school of painting known as the Vienna Secession, embodies the high-keyed erotic, psychological and aesthetic preoccupations of turn-of-the-century Vienna's intellectual world.
He has been called the preeminent exponent of Art Nouveau. Gustav Klimt began in 1883 as an artist-decorator in association with his brother and Franz Matsoh. In 1886-92, Klimt executed mural decorations for staircases at the Burgtheater and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; these confirmed Klimt's eclecticism and broadened his range of historical references. Klimt was a cofounder and the first president of the Vienna Secession, a group of modernist architects and artists who organized their own exhibition society and gave rise to the Secession Movement or the Viennese version of Art Nouveau.
In 1897 Klimt's mature style emerged, The primal forces of sexuality, regeneration, love and death form the dominant themes of Klimt's artwork. Soon thereafter he painted three allegorical murals for the ceiling of the University of Vienna auditorium that were violently criticized, the erotic symbolism and pessimism of these works created such a scandal that the murals were rejected. Klimt's most successful works include The Kiss and a series of portraits he did of fashionable Viennese women, such as Frau Fritza Riedler and Frau Adele Bloch-Bauer (1906,1907, Osterreichische Gallery).
In The Kiss (1908, Osterreichische Gallery), beautifully rendered figures float dreamlike in space, wrapped in an abstracted mosaic robe that veils graceful organic contours. The rhythmic flowing line and biomorphic form of Klimt's unparalleled oil paintings became a potent influence on the Art Nouveau movement. In other works he treats the human figure without shadow and heightens the lush sensuality of skin by surrounding it with areas of flat, highly ornamental and brilliantly composed decorations. In Danae, seemingly underwater, thighs drawn up, gold and silver seminal flow rising between her legs. Very erotic. The legend concerns her mating with Zeus in the form of a gold shower, to conceive Perseus, which is depicted here. The eroticism is highly intentional. The small black rectangle is Klimt's reduction of maleness to an abstract symbol.
Klimt's style drew upon an enormous range of sources, classical Greek, Byzantine, Egyptian and Minoan art and late-medieval paintings. In synthesizing these diverse sources, Klimt's art achieved both individuality and extreme elegance as one of the worlds artist. Klimt's Adele Bloch-Bauer recently sold at auction for $135,000,000 in July, 2006.
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