Gustav Klimt

In my efforts to produce a halfway decent piece for my 20th Century Art class I have been doing quite a study on Gustav Klimt.

Sadly, my piece; though unfinished, is lackluster and sophmoric. His style is quite difficult to replicate. While I wasn't trying to produce a copy, I was hoping to capture some of him in my work.

Death and Life (1908-1911, revised in 1915) is where I took my idea for composition and color choice. We see a tangled mess of bodies being wached over by a dark figure, obviously death. These men and women are at various stages in life, blanketed in lively colors, which are then surrounded in a deep blue color. This blue-green color is very symbolic for Klimt. He very associated blue closely with death. Then you see death sort of leering, always nearby. He is elongated...and his skull even has this expression, a twisted sort of smile. While unnerving I think he wanted death to seem malicious. But that is a common missconception mot people carry - death does not attack, it does not pick and choose, it just happens and whether you believe in fate or not it still applies. But Klimt lost a both his father and youner sister in a very short time and never really came to terms with it. He became a nervous man. What he wanted to accomplish with this piece was to make the viewer realized that death engulfs life.

Another piece of his I love is Danae (1907-1908). She was a subject of longing and desire in greek mthology. She was strikingly bautiful and imprisoned in a tower by her father to protect her virginity and to evade the fullfillment of a prophecy. But Zeus was not to be outdone and visited her in the form of a golden shower (hold the giggling) and impregnating her, releasing her to her tragic destiny.
In this work Klimt makes her he embodiment of lust and sexual desire. She seems locked in a moment of pleasure. Her right hand is tensed; griped around something, her face in a sort of "swoon", she is temporarily ruled by her exuding sexuality.

I do enjoy that Klimt makes a point to hide her reproductive organs, to put them in the foreground and make us focus more on her face, though her breasts are exposed.

Something else I notice is that she appears to exist within a liquid, womb-like ambient.

She is the product and victim of her own sexual nature. This piece is not the first of Klimt's that has a potent sexual attitude. Water Serpents I is a good example. And most of these sorts of pieces were well-received in the Viennese public and were exponentially less challenged than his University paintings. Though today, attitudes are somewhat reversed and people much refer his allegories to his pieces that exude sexuality.

Water Serpents I (1904 - 1907) is the first of many images he paints depicting lesbian relationships. This subject became quite popular among the fin-de-siecle art connoisseurs, who tend to enjoy the notion of women awash in a sea of sexual impulses.

Water is a perilous - man can drown but also needs it to sustain life. And women in happiness without men is just the same, though I do not think that as his intent. The women here aren't so much homosexual as they are presexual. To explain I will use what Klimt did in many of his earlier works where form is function. In this piece he uses an ambiguous figure-ground relationship set up by the women's stylized bodies. He almost makes them two-dimensional mirrors of each other. I like how he avoided the more conventional renderings of this sexual theme. He lays them one on to of the other making them a condensed, tight column of abstract forms.

This piece sort of bridges the span between his pseudo-impressionistic style and his harsher, geometric "gold" period. Of course gold wasn't a new development as he used is previously in the 19th century.

Another reason I love this piece is my personal fascination wth the ocean, water. Upon my first viewing I focused more of the element of water, the movement. I can see how this would be associated with things of a sexual nature. The ebb and low of the tide is a good idea to use a symbolism for sex.

Perhaps his most famous piece is The Kiss (1907 - 1908). It has been is most popular painting since and even before it's completion as it was purchased by the Austrian state shortly before he finished it. It is also arguably one of his best paintings. It is not weighed down by philosophical ponderings or tied to any allegorical symbolism, nor is it the subject of anything mythological. It is simply an embrace, a kiss, something beautiful and understood by all. It is one of the most

transcendent images. His towering of bodies is a reoccuring style for Klimt. He makes them a single unit, the union between man and woman that is a monument to love. Careful studies of the preliminary drawings for this painting led many to believe that Klimt himself posed for this painting with his fiend Emilie Floge, though the faces are stylized.

Despite all his pieces ful of explicit scenes of raw sexuality and eroticism this piece might be an ironic icon to chastity. It is innocent, it is love in its purest form.

Gustav Klimt is thoroughly fascinating and truly an inspiration to me.

fin-de-siecle: pertaining to, or characterized by concepts of art, society, etc., associated with the end of the 19th century.