Hello, welcome to Artist in School, the home of art history for young people and interested
amateurs. Today we are going to look at the artist, Gustav Klimt, wonderful painter. He
is very famous for producing paintings like these, but did you know he also produced work
like this. Let’s go and find out some more, shall we? Come on.
In 1862 Gustav Klimt was born at Baumgarten, near Vienna on the 14th of July, the 2nd of
seven children. His father was engraver and goldsmith from Bohemia. It was an unusually
talented family, his brother George followed his father's footsteps and became a goldsmith,
whilst his brother Ernest, also showed the same precocious talent for drawing and painting,
that Klimt himself displayed. At the age of 14, in 1876 Gustav and his brother
Ernst were sent to the newly established school of Applied Arts in Vienna where, over the
next seven years, they learnt to master not only oil painting, but mosaic and fresco techniques
as well. In his spare time Klimt earned extra money by drawing portraits from photographs,
which also helped to perfect his ability to capture accurate likenesses of people.
In fact, the drawing professor was so impressed with the ability of Klimt, his brother Ernst
and their friend and fellow student Franz Matsch, that he recommended the trio for a
number of prestigious commissions. So, it is not surprising that Klimt was just 17 when
he found himself helping to design the pageant for Emperor Franz Josef’s silver wedding
celebrations. Gustav finished his training at the school
of Applied Art in Vienna in 1883 and set up the Artist’s Company together with his brother
Ernst and Franz Matsch. Success came quickly, and it was not long before they were working
on decorative projects, for wealthy owners of villas in Vienna and surrounding provinces.
But the ultimate recognition for their abilities came when they were given the prestigious
job of decorating the ceiling and staircases of the newly built Burgtheater in Vienna.
The theme of the decoration was to be the history of art from ancient Greece to the
Renaissance and resulted in a quite remarkable series of portraits and images using a mixture
of styles. They started work on the Burgtheater paintings in 1886 and finished them 2 years
later. Shortly afterwards, Klimt was awarded the Golden Cross of Merit for his work on
the project. 1890 saw Klimt complete one of his earliest
portraits, that of Joseph Pembauer, the famous Viennese pianist, in which he combined both
naturalistic portraiture and a stylised background. This combination of styles would form the
foundation on which his future portraits would be based.
In 1892 Ernst and his father died and for a while Klimt produced very little, but in
1894 he and Matsch were asked by the Ministry of Education to produce a series of designs
for the ceiling of the Great Hall at Vienna University. After a great deal of debate,
it was agreed that Klimt should tackle three panels on the themes of philosophy, medicine
and jurisprudence which represented three of the university’s Faculties. It was a
mammoth undertaking and something of an artistic and physical challenge for Klimt.
However, Klimt exhibited the first picture, ‘philosophy’ at the secession Exhibition
in 1900. The critics had a field day accusing him of producing a painting that was chaotic,
nonsensical and out of keeping with the intended setting, as well as being a completely different
style to Matsch’s work. The Ministry of Education approved his ceiling paintings in
1903, but Klimt was so offended by the outcry that he abandoned the scheme in 1905, denouncing
overburdening censorship and protesting the lack of artistic freedom.
His battle between artistic freedom and conservative attitudes to art had first become public in
1897 when Klimt left the Cooperative Society of Austrian artists for the newly founded
Vienna Secession. This was a radical group of young artists who were against Vienna’s
inward-looking provincial view of art, instead choosing to promote more international trends
in art and the breaking of barriers between fine and applied art. They published their
ideas through their magazine Ver Sacrum, and soon elected Klimt as the Secession’s first
president. To Viennese Society, Klimt appeared to be part of the establishment, but privately
he was completely the opposite. He was a passionate champion of individual and artistic freedom,
a bohemian who was more at home wondering around his studio in his huge, blue monk’s
smock, rather than the suit adopted by many of the successful painters of his generation.
However, the scandal of the university paintings did not have a devastating effect upon Klimt’s
career. It's true he received no more official commissions, but there were plenty of private
clients interested in his work and many artistically inclined wives of Viennese industrialists,
who were drawn to his ability to paint portraits of beautiful women in elegantly languid and
flattering poses. From this time onwards, portraits such as
these, made Klimt a lot of money, wealthy Society women seemed to love his unconventional
and unorthodox approach to painting. In 1902 the Leipzig sculptor Max Klinger arranged
to exhibit a statue of Beethoven at the secession building in Vienna, which surprisingly was
nicknamed the Golden Cabbage. As a tribute to Klinger, Klimt and his friends refurbished
the entire secession building as a kind of Beethoven’s temple. Klimt’s contribution
was a frieze running along 3 walls of a room consisting of four main scenes suggested by
Beethoven 9th choral symphony. You can see here how Klimt has recreated a visual equivalent
of the passionate choral outburst at the end of the symphony.
Also, in 1902 he produced this portrait of Emilie Flöge, this stunning image marks the
beginning of a new phase in Klimt’s art, which is characterized by his use of large
detailed decorative patterns, combined with realistic depictions of faces and hands. Emilie
Flöge was the younger sister of Ernst's wife. She was a fashion designer who owned a fashion
shop in Vienna and was Klimt's companion for more than 25 years. Gustav was genuinely devoted
to Emilie and spent almost every summer for 20 years with her and her family at fashionable
lakeside resorts where he could indulge his love of swimming, rowing and playing around
in motorboats, but they never married or had children. It was during these times that Klimt
produced many of his landscape paintings. In 1905 he painted a portrait of the daughter
of the wealthy industrialist Karl Wittgenstein who became one of Klimt’s most important
patrons. He made her face and hands seem extraordinary alive and by contrast, the dress and the shawl
are painted in quietly restrained and subtle white on white fashion. She didn’t like
the portrait, she thought it made her look too innocent, timid and girlish.
During this time, he allowed his garden to become totally overgrown and he would enjoy
many hours painting pictures of it from very close range. He also continued to paint portraits,
as you can see here. This one, being the portrait of Fritza Riedler, who was the German wife
of a top Viennese civil servant. In 1904 Klimt was asked to produce draft drawings
for a frieze of three mosaics for a room in the newly built Palais Stoclet in Brussels,
he completed the work in 1911. The frieze is of indeterminate content and therefore
open to a variety of interpretations, in fact Klimt himself rarely mentioned the piece all,
Although, he did once describe the single woman in the picture, as simply as a dancer.
This period also coincides with what is usually regarded as Klimt’s golden phase, simply
because of the great abundance of gold leaf appears in many of his paintings.
Perhaps, the most spectacular painting Klimt produced during his golden phase, and possibly
his most famous, was The Kiss, painted when he was 45 years old. Here you can see a wonderful
balance between the glittering geometric ornamentation and the bed of flowers, and the emotional
force of the two figures expressed through their compact kneeling pose and powerful embrace.
Surely, The Kiss represents the ultimate in human fulfilment.
Klimt was now at the height of his powers and his popularity. He regularly contributed
work to many international exhibitions, for example, in 1911 he contributed 8 paintings
to a major exhibition in Rome and was awarded the first prize for his painting Death and
Life. During the winters he would work in his studio
painting portraits, or working on commissions, but most summers would be spent painting landscapes
around Attersee, a lakes and alpine region near Salzburg. But in 1913 he chose to spend
July and August around Lake Garda, in Italy creating paintings of small lakeside villages
as though from a boat. Klimt commanded remarkably high prices for
his portraits which was just as well, because he would paint very slowly and often made
numerous changes. What was also annoying from his patrons’ point of view, was that he
would often be working on number of paintings at the same time.
In 1917 Klimt became an honorary member of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, perhaps
this was just compensation considering the Ministry of Education had rejected his professorship
for the fourth time. But on the 11th January 1918 Klimt suffered
a stroke in his flat in Vienna which paralysed his right side. Hopes of a recovery faded
when he contracted pneumonia and he died on the 6th of February aged just 55, a few months
before the complete collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the most exciting period in Viennese
cultural history. Klimt was a lifelong bachelor who had countless
liaisons during his lifetime, usually with his models, and is rumoured to have fathered
more than a dozen children along the way. But it was Emilie Flöge who was his inspiration
and for almost half his life, his most enduring relationship.
Perhaps Klimt himself best summed up his life's work when he said, “I have never painted
a self-portrait. I am less interested in myself as a subject for painting than I am in other
people, above all women.” Thank you for watching, I hope you’ve enjoyed
the video and learnt a lot about the artist Gustav Klimt. If you interested in the lives
of other great artists, then please check out my channel, where you’ll find lots of
fascinating videos about some of the world’s greatest painters. Please don’t forget to
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