Gustav Klimt and the Search for the Modern Man
Lizzie Himmel, H-Band
Background
The Secession
movement was, essentially, the reaction of fin-de-siècle
Viennese artists against the norms and styles of their conservative society.
The artists strove to find a new way to see and represent the world, and eventually
this endeavor found its home in the Secession House
of the Viennese Ringstrasse. The founders of the movement itself were Gustav
Klimt and Otto Wagner. In 1897, Klimt
joined with others of the same mind and started the Secession, an art movement
dedicated to psychological and emotional expansion, along with the accompanying
periodical “Ver Sacrum” (sacred spring). Klimt’s art is free,
sensual, psychological and gripping. The work itself is characterized by an
extremely ornate style, consisting of myriads of intricate patterns and designs,
many of which shine with a variety of different pigments applied as paint onto
the canvas.
Thesis
Halfway between classical and abstract,
thoroughly romantic, and deeply influenced by Paris’ Art Nouveau, Gustav
Klimt was the leader of a movement dedicated to a new openness and self discovery.
As leader of the Secession, Klimt was, arguably, both the last 19th and first
20th century painter, creating art that was a true transition
from the old Vienna of strict tradition and ceremony to the new fin-de-siècle
atmosphere of intellectual and emotional discovery. This atmosphere has been
named “modernity” and means, on its most
basic level, change. The gap between the Secession and the old society was breached
at first by Klimt’s unique usage of popular
symbols, and subsequently widened with his departure
into the realm of universalized, non-historic representations. His ruminations
on the nature of modern man (and
of course, modern woman) are a morass of contrasts—sharp
and smooth, flat and textured, humans are adrift in a jumble of bright patterns
and golden swirls. They are depicted through not classical, Apollonian
ideals but Dionysian feelings and emotions—Klimt’s
work is at once a stimulant of and response to modernism, the changed world
of the 20th century, with all its various patterns, truths, dangers, and of
course its chaos. Surrounded by sensuality, danger, challenge, entrapment, twining
limbs and nubile bodies, the modern man is all but drowning in color.
Index of Other Links:
"Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" / "The Kiss"
"Water Snakes II" / "Danae"