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146-625: The Beethoven Frieze (German: Beethovenfries ) is a painting by Gustav Klimt on display in the Secession Building , Vienna, Austria. In 1902, Klimt painted the Beethoven Frieze for the Fourteenth Vienna Secession exhibition in celebration of 75th anniversary of the composer Ludwig van Beethoven's death. It was featured alongside a monumental polychrome sculpture by Max Klinger . Meant for

292-552: A Google doodle celebrating Klimt's painting The Kiss on his 150th birthday, 14 July 2012. In 2012, the Austrian Mint began a five-coin gold series to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Klimt's birth. The first 50 Euro gold coin was issued on 25 January 2012 and featured a portrait of Klimt on the obverse and a portion of his painting of Adele Bloch-Bauer. In 2013, the Gustav Klimt Foundation

438-514: A knight , driving him to champion the driving force: happiness. The middle panel displays personified threats to the striving (imagined as male) individual, such as lust and sexuality's then feared consequence: syphilis . Controversial in its time, this scene prefigures Picasso's putative brothel scene in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon . The frieze's (as solution to the problem of lust, or libido, gone astray) and culminates choir singing in

584-755: A "gala edition" bound in gilt leather. The set contains detailed images from previously released works (Hygeia from the University Mural Medicine , 1901; a section of the third University Mural Jurisprudence , 1903), as well as the unfinished paintings ( Adam and Eve , Bridal Progress ). In 1963, the Albertina museum in Vienna began researching the drawings of Gustav Klimt. The research project Gustav Klimt. Die Zeichnungen , has since been associated with intensive exhibition and publication activities. Between 1980 and 1984 Alice Strobl published

730-512: A certain vulgarization of it: the replicas of Symbolist works of art led to their devaluation to a certain kitsch taste, and the attempt to find a new language far removed from the crude bourgeois aesthetic sometimes degenerated into a poor substitute for it. Symbolism influenced several contemporary movements, such as modernism and naïve art , as well as several of the early "isms" of avant-garde art , such as Fauvism , expressionism , futurism , surrealism and even abstract art : some of

876-555: A claim for the Beethoven Frieze to be returned. However, the Austrian Art Restitution Advisory Board definitively rejected this request in 2015, finding that Erich Lederer had voluntarily negotiated the sale price and that the Austrian government had significantly invested in its restoration at the Secession Building . Because of the frieze's fame and popularity, it was made the main motif of

1022-404: A clear preference for artistic realism throughout the century, which was evident in movements such as realist painting and impressionism. In contrast to this, first poets and then artists expressed a new way of understanding life, more subjective and spiritual, a reflection of their existential anguish in a time of loss of both moral and religious values, which is why they entered into the search for

1168-484: A collectors' coin: the Austrian 100 euro Secession Coin , minted on 10 November 2004. The reverse side features a small portion of the frieze. The extract from the painting features three figures: a knight in armor representing "Armored Strength", one woman in the background symbolizing "Ambition" holding up a wreath of victory and a second woman representing "Sympathy" with lowered head and clasped hands. Gustav Klimt Gustav Klimt (14 July 1862 – 6 February 1918)

1314-512: A constant, especially in art linked to religious beliefs, from Egyptian art or Aztec art to Christian art , Islamic art , Buddhist art or any of the multiple religions that have arisen throughout history. A symbolic background has been present in most modern artistic movements, such as the Renaissance , Mannerism , Baroque , Rococo or Romanticism . In general, these movements have been opposed to others that placed greater emphasis on

1460-605: A government committee recommended that Klimt's Lady with Hat and Feather Boa , in Belvedere Museum in Vienna, be restituted to the heirs of the Jewish family that had owned it before the Nazi Anschluss. National Public Radio reported on 17 January 2006 that "The Austrian National Gallery is being compelled by a national arbitration board to return five paintings by Gustav Klimt to a Los Angeles based woman,

1606-456: A heavy, cream-colored wove paper with deckle edges . Thirty-one of the images (ten of which are multicolored) are printed on Chine-collé . The remaining nineteen are high quality halftones prints. Each piece was marked with a unique signet—designed by Klimt—which was impressed into the wove paper in gold metallic ink. The prints were issued in groups of ten to subscribers, in unbound black paper folders embossed with Klimt's name. Because of

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1752-403: A high degree of refinement based solely on the artist's sensibility. In France, Théophile Gautier turned a quotation from Victor Cousin 's Course de philosophie into the motto l'art pour l'art , which was the workhorse of aestheticism. This phrase synthesized the belief in the absolute autonomy of art, which dispenses with any moral or ideological conditioning to express the idea of beauty as

1898-478: A homogeneous style, it was an amalgam of styles grouped by a series of common factors, such as themes, ways of understanding life and art, literary and musical influences, and an opposition to realism and scientific positivism. It was a sometimes contradictory movement, which mixed the desire for modernity and a break with tradition with nostalgia for the past, the ugliness of decadentism with the beauty of aestheticism, serenity with exaltation, reason with madness. There

2044-541: A large extent, especially thanks to the work of Gaetano Previati ; Futurist artists such as Umberto Boccioni , Giacomo Balla and Carlo Carrà were close to symbolism in their early work, as well as Giorgio de Chirico , the greatest exponent of metaphysical painting . For its part, surrelism was influenced by artists such as Odilon Redon , William Degouve de Nuncques and Alberto Martini , whose mark can be perceived in artists such as Paul Delvaux , René Magritte , Paul Klee or Salvador Dalí . As we have seen, France

2190-771: A lease on public land to erect an exhibition hall . The group's symbol was Pallas Athena , the Greek goddess of just causes, wisdom, and the arts—of whom Klimt painted his radical version in 1898. In 1894, Klimt was commissioned to create three paintings to decorate the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna . Not completed until the turn of the century, his three paintings, Philosophy , Medicine , and Jurisprudence were criticized for their radical themes and material, and were called " pornographic ". Klimt had transformed traditional allegory and symbolism into

2336-743: A long robe with no undergarments. His simple life was somewhat cloistered, devoted to his art, family, and little else except the Secessionist Movement from which he and many colleagues eventually resigned. He avoided café society and seldom socialized with other artists. Klimt's fame usually brought patrons to his door and he could afford to be highly selective. His painting method was very deliberate and painstaking at times and he required lengthy sittings by his subjects. Although very active sexually, he kept his affairs discreet and he avoided personal scandal. The artist cultivated close relationships with some of his clients, who were primarily from

2482-522: A loving embrace directly referencing Beethoven's "kiss" of all humanity in his symphony The symbolism of the frieze was laid out in great detail to the original public through a published exhibition brochure. In 1903, art collector Carl Reininghaus acquired the Klimt's Beethoven Frieze to prevent its destruction after the 14th Vienna Secession. In appreciation for preserving his work, Klimt provided Reininghaus with over 100 preparatory sketches, one of which

2628-804: A man what life means to him and develop its innermost significance, I feel the same about these paintings." In 1911 his painting Death and Life received first prize in the world exhibitions in Rome. In 1915 Anna, his mother, died. Klimt died three years later in Vienna on 6 February 1918, having suffered a stroke and pneumonia brought about by the Spanish flu . He was buried at the Hietzinger Cemetery in Hietzing , Vienna. Numerous paintings by him were left unfinished . The only folio set produced in Klimt's lifetime, Das Werk Gustav Klimts ,

2774-650: A musical performer. His father, Ernst Klimt the Elder, formerly from Bohemia , was a gold engraver. All three of their sons displayed artistic talent early on. Klimt's younger brothers were Ernst Klimt and Georg Klimt  [ de ] . Klimt lived in poverty while attending the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule , a school of applied arts and crafts , now the University of Applied Arts Vienna , where he studied architectural painting from 1876 until 1883. He revered Vienna's foremost history painter of

2920-416: A new language and a new category of values that manifest their inner world, their beliefs, their emotions, their fears, their longings. According to Johannes Dobai, "Symbolist art tends to generalize, through images, an individual, or rather unconscious, experience of the world." Symbolism was an eclectic movement, which brought together a number of artists with common concerns and sensibilities. More than

3066-546: A new language that was more overtly sexual and hence more disturbing to some. The public outcry came from all quarters—political, aesthetic and religious. As a result, the paintings (seen in gallery below) were not displayed on the ceiling of the Great Hall. This was to be the last public commission accepted by the artist. All three paintings were destroyed when retreating German forces burned Schloss Immendorf in May 1945, together with another ten paintings, including Schubert at

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3212-596: A new success with the paintings of his "golden phase", many of which include gold leaf . Klimt's work was an important influence on his younger peer Egon Schiele . Since the 1990s, he has been one of the artists whose paintings fetch top prices at auctions. Gustav Klimt was born in Baumgarten , near Vienna in the Austrian Empire , the second of seven children—three boys and four girls. His mother, Anna Klimt ( née Finster), had an unrealized ambition to be

3358-741: A number of panels in 1914 for the Venice Hotel Terminus called "La Primavera" and "Mille e una notte". These were later exhibited in the Boncompagni Ludovisi Decorative Art Museum . In 1972 the Vienna State Opera presented a new production of Salome , an opera by Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss , in a Klimt inspired stage setting and costumes by Jürgen Rose . This production, directed by Boleslaw Barlog and first conducted by Karl Böhm , became extremely popular and stayed in

3504-448: A painting up to that point. On 7 August 2006, Christie's auction house announced it was handling the sale of the remaining four works by Klimt that were recovered by Maria Altmann and her co-heirs after their long legal battle against Austria (see Republic of Austria v. Altmann ). Altmann's fight to regain her family's paintings has been the subject of a number of documentary films, including Adele's Wish . Her struggle also became

3650-508: A phenomenon that emerged in the United Kingdom, the dandies are children of Victorian morality, and although they rebel against it, they do so from a passive attitude, reduced to insolence, sarcasm and skepticism. They disdain vulgarity and focus on pleasure, whether physical or intellectual. Decadentism was a fin-de-siecular current perceptible both in art and in literature, music and other cultural manifestations, which emphasized

3796-562: A reaction towards more natural and handcrafted forms, as seen in the Arts & Crafts movement, which led to a revaluation of the decorative arts. All this led to the so-called "Aesthetic Movement", led by John Ruskin , who defended the dignity of craftsmanship and a conception of art aimed at beauty. Ruskin advocated a gospel of beauty , in which art is consubstantial with life, it is a basic necessity that makes human beings rise from their animal condition; rather than an embellishment of life, art

3942-450: A romantic vision of evil and the occult sciences; a certain tendency towards the grotesque and the sensational, and a taste for the morbid and perverse; a rejection of conventional morality; and a dramatic conception of life. Romantic sensibility was carried to exaggeration, especially in the taste for the morbid and terrifying, and an "aesthetic of evil" emerged, appreciable in the attraction to satanism , magic and paranormal phenomena, or

4088-413: A self-portrait. I am less interested in myself as a subject for a painting than I am in other people, above all women... There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night ... Whoever wants to know something about me ... ought to look carefully at my pictures." In 1901 Hermann Bahr wrote, in his Speech on Klimt : "Just as only a lover can reveal to

4234-562: A sensual but languid type of beauty, with a certain air of melancholy and idealization of the female figure. On September 18, 1886, Jean Moréas published in Le Figaro a literary manifesto in which he defined symbolism as "the enemy of teaching, declamation, false sensibility and objective description". According to Moréas, art was the analogical and concrete expression of the Idea, in which sensory and spiritual elements merge. For his part,

4380-411: A special emphasis on the world of dreams and mysticism , as well as on various aspects of counterculture and marginality, such as esotericism , Satanism , terror , death, sin , sex and perversion —symptomatic in this sense is the fascination of these artists with the figure of the femme fatale . All this was manifested in line with decadentism , a fin-de-siecle cultural current that stressed

4526-487: A special interest in mother-child relationships. One of his hallmarks was to envelop the figures in a yellowish mist, like limbs, an effect that isolates the figures and separates them from the viewer, with the aim of emphasizing their essence. Henri Fantin-Latour was a painter of a rather realistic style, as denoted by his portraits and still lifes inspired by Chardin . However, his compositions inspired by musical themes-especially by Wagner , Schumann and Berlioz -have

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4672-582: A style based on soft drawing and phosphorescent-looking coloring. He was influenced by artists such as Holbein , Dürer , Bosch , Rembrandt , Goya , Delacroix and Corot . Scientific materialism also exerted a powerful influence on his work: he studied anatomy , osteology and zoology , knowledge that is reflected in his work; hence his preference for heads with closed eyes, resembling protozoans . Redon illustrated numerous works by symbolist writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe or The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Gustave Flaubert (1886). In 1884 he founded

4818-641: A subjective coloring, alien to naturalism. In his youth he briefly passed through the workshops of Delacroix , Coutoure and Chassériau and made two trips to Italy, but perhaps most transcendent for the formation of his serene and restful style was his relationship with the Greek princess Maria Cantacuzeno, who transmitted her intense spirituality to him. In 1861, with the allegories of War and Peace (Municipal Museum of Amiens ) he began his muralist work, for which he received numerous commissions throughout France and which would make him famous. He painted murals in

4964-493: A symbolic figure in some of his works, including Ancient Greece and Egypt (1891), Pallas Athene (1898) and Nuda Veritas (1899). Historians believe that Klimt with the nuda veritas denounced both the policy of the Habsburgs and Austrian society, which ignored all political and social problems of that time. In the early 1890s Klimt met Austrian fashion designer Emilie Louise Flöge (a sibling of his sister-in-law) who

5110-498: A time, any work of art from the second half of the 19th century with a dreamlike or psychological content was considered symbolist. Finally it was considered to be a broad cultural current covering a timeline between the late 19th and early 20th centuries developed throughout Europe—including Russia—and with some reminiscences in the United States, a current that agglutinated totally or partially diverse autonomous styles, such as

5256-609: A twilight setting. Eugène Carrière started as a lithographer before studying at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he was a student of Alexandre Cabanel. In 1890 he founded with Puvis de Chavannes the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts, where he exhibited regularly. Realist in style, his subject matter delved into symbolism thanks to his interest in emotional suggestion, with a velaturas technique of gray and brown tones that would be characteristic of his production. His subject matter focused preferably on domestic scenes, with

5402-434: A type of leonardesque beauty, with undefined features, which will have a symbolic equivalent in flowers such as the lily or animals such as the swan and the peacock . Symbolists often portrayed characters such as Eve, Salome , Judith , Messalina or Cleopatra , prototypes of femme fatale, of the vampiric female who turned female sexuality into a dangerous and mysterious power, often associated with sin, as glimpsed in

5548-473: Is a taste for magic, theosophy and occult sciences, and a certain attraction to Satanism. In relation to this, a work of reference for Symbolist artists was Eduard von Hartmann 's Philosophy of the Unconscious (1877), in which it was stated that art should be a method of penetrating the unconscious and revealing its most hidden mysteries. In connection with a taste for the mysterious and unconscious,

5694-418: Is also an overlap between different styles that coexist simultaneously: Neo-Impressionism and Post-Impressionism , modernism , symbolism , synthetism , ingenuism ; as well as between the plastic arts: painting, sculpture, illustration , decorative arts , and between these and poetry, theater, and music. Art historiography has found it difficult to establish stylistic parameters common to symbolism. For

5840-473: Is always more abstract than we imagine. Form and color speak to us of form and color, and that is all". With Symbolist art, the autonomy of artistic language is achieved: art breaks with tradition and builds a parallel universe, paving a virgin ground that will serve as a foundation for new ways of understanding art in the early 20th century: the historical avant-garde . Symbolism was also an attempt to save Western humanistic culture, called into question since

5986-541: Is at the basis of Symbolist art, to the point that some experts consider it a part of the Romantic movement. The immediate predecessor of Symbolism was Pre-Raphaelitism, a group of British artists who were inspired—as their name suggests—by Italian painters before Raphael , as well as by the newly emerging photography, with exponents such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti , John Everett Millais , William Holman Hunt , Ford Madox Brown and Edward Burne-Jones . Although his style

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6132-596: Is bad." In 1902, animated by resentment Klimt wanted to title the painting Gold Fish (in which a naked woman ostentatiously and maliciously shows her butt), "To my critics", but was dissuaded by friends. In 1902, Klimt finished the Beethoven Frieze for the Fourteenth Vienna Secessionist exhibition, which was intended to be a celebration of the composer and featured a monumental polychrome sculpture by Max Klinger . Intended for

6278-766: Is crossed, it can mean: individualism in literature, freedom of art, abandonment of taught formulas, tendency towards everything new, strange and even unusual; and it can also mean: idealism, disdain for social anecdote, anti-naturalism. Symbolist painting was closely linked to literature, so that many of the works of the Symbolist literati served as inspiration for artists, especially Edgar Allan Poe , Charles Baudelaire , Gustave Flaubert , Gérard de Nerval , Arthur Rimbaud , Stéphane Mallarmé , Oscar Wilde , Maurice Maeterlinck , Stefan George , Rainer Maria Rilke , Richard Dehmel , Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal . Other literary referents of symbolism are found in

6424-498: Is life itself. Another theorist of the movement was Walter Pater , who established in his works that the artist must live life intensely, following beauty as an ideal. For Pater, art is "the magic circle of existence", an isolated and autonomous world placed at the service of pleasure, elaborating an authentic metaphysics of beauty. Subsequently, authors such as James Abbott McNeill Whistler , Oscar Wilde , Algernon Charles Swinburne and Stéphane Mallarmé developed this tendency to

6570-434: Is one of psychological introspection, often idealized, especially in the woman, in whom the eyes, mouth and hair are emphasized. Baudelaire compared the eyes to jewels and the hair to a symphony of scents or a sea of waves. The eyes were considered mirrors of the soul, generally nostalgic and melancholic. As for the mouth, it could be large like a flower or small as a symbol of silence, as in the work of Fernand Khnopff . As for

6716-521: Is realistic, with images of great detail, bright colors and brilliant workmanship, his works are full of symbolic allusions, often of literary inspiration and with a moralizing tone, as well as a strong mysticism. His subject matter is often centered on medieval legends—especially the Arthurian cycle —the Renaissance world or shakespearean dramas. His aesthetic generally focuses on feminine beauty,

6862-603: Is the dark attraction to the perverse woman, the femme fatale , the Eve turned Lilith , the enigmatic and distant, disturbing woman, the woman that Manuel Machado defined as brittle, vicious, and mystical, pre-Raphaelite virgin and Parisian cat . She is a woman loved and hated, adored and reviled, exalted and repudiated, virtuous and sinful, who will adopt numerous symbolic and allegorical forms, such as sphinx , mermaid , chimera , medusa , winged genie, etc. A type of artificial and androgynous , ambiguous beauty became fashionable,

7008-672: The Wiener Secession in 1897 and of the group's periodical, Ver Sacrum ("Sacred Spring"). He remained with the Secession until 1908. The goals of the group were to provide exhibitions for unconventional young artists, to bring the works of the best foreign artists to Vienna, and to publish its own magazine to showcase the work of members. The group declared no manifesto and did not set out to encourage any particular style— Naturalists , Realists , and Symbolists all coexisted. The government supported their efforts and gave them

7154-658: The Altaussee salt mine in Austria in 1945, it was returned to Serena's son, Erich Lederer. In 1973, Erich sold the frieze for $ 750,000 (half of its purported market value ) to the Austrian government in exchange for Chancellor Bruno Kreisky granting export licenses for the Lederer family's other Klimt pieces. Over ten years, Manfred Koller of the Austrian Federal Monuments Office restored

7300-647: The Copernican Revolution relegated the Earth as the center of the universe and, especially, since the Darwinian theory of evolution relegated the human being from his condition as sovereign of creation. Faced with the excessive scientism of Western 19th century culture, the symbolists sought to recover human values, but they found themselves in a scenario in which these were already distorted, in crisis, so what they recovered were values in decadence,

7446-524: The Kunsthalle (Hall of Art) in 1917, to try to keep local artists from going abroad. Artists who reinterpreted Klimt's work include Slovak artist Rudolf Fila . Already during his lifetime Klimt influenced other artists, such as the Italian Liberty style artist Galileo Chini (1873–1956). Klimt was exhibited at the 1910 Venice Biennale . Chini and Vittorio Zecchin (1878–1947) created

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7592-677: The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Klimt began his professional career painting interior murals and ceilings in large public buildings on the Ringstraße , including a successful series of "Allegories and Emblems". In 1888 Klimt received the Golden Order of Merit from Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria for his contributions to murals painted in the Burgtheater in Vienna. He also became an honorary member of

7738-472: The Rosicrucians . Stylistically there was great diversity within Symbolist painting, as is denoted by comparing the sumptuous exoticism of Gustave Moreau with the melancholic serenity of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes . Pictorial symbolism was related to other earlier and later movements: Pre-Raphaelitism is usually considered an antecedent of this movement, while at the beginning of the 20th century it

7884-593: The Société des Artistes Indépendants . Alphonse Osbert studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris, where he was a disciple of Henri Lehmann , Léon Bonnat and Fernand Cormon . His first stylistic reference was the Spanish Baroque , especially José de Ribera . He was also influenced by Georges Seurat and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Through his friend the critic Henry Degron he entered

8030-413: The University of Munich and the University of Vienna . In 1892 Klimt's father and brother Ernst both died, and he had to assume financial responsibility for his father's and brother's families. The tragedies also affected his artistic vision and soon he would move towards a new personal style. Characteristic of his style at the end of the 19th century is the inclusion of Nuda Veritas ( naked truth ) as

8176-447: The "symbol", that is, of a type of content, whether written, sonorous or plastic, whose purpose is to transcend matter to signify a superior order of intangible elements, has always existed in art as a human manifestation, one of whose qualities has always been spiritual evocation and the search for a language that transcends reality. Thus, the presence of the symbol in art can be perceived as early as prehistoric cave painting and has been

8322-671: The Austrian State Printing Office, Gustav Klimt An Aftermath was intended to complete the lifetime folio Das Werk Gustav Klimts . The folio contains thirty colored collotypes (fourteen of which are multicolored) and follows a similar format found in Das Werk Gustav Klimts , replacing the unique Klimt-designed signets with gold-debossed plate numbers. One hundred and fifty sets were produced in English, with twenty of them (Nos. I–XX) presented as

8468-531: The Bible, with a special predilection for fatal characters such as Salome. Moreau was still trained in Romanticism under the influence of his teacher, Théodore Chassériau , but evolved to a personal style in both subject matter and technique, with images of mystical cut with a strong component of sensuality, a resplendent chromaticism with an enamel-like finish and the use of a chiaroscuro of golden shadows. He

8614-660: The English Pre-Raphaelitism , the French Nabis, the modernism present for example in Gustav Klimt or even an incipient Expressionism perceptible in the work of Edvard Munch . According to Philippe Jullian , "there has never been a symbolist school of painting, but rather a symbolist taste." Symbolism exalts subjectivity, the inner experience. According to Amy Dempsey, "the Symbolists were

8760-601: The Parisian Rue de Rochefoucauld—now the Musée Moreau—where he produced some 850 paintings, in addition to drawings and watercolors. Moreau was a teacher of Henri Matisse , Albert Marquet and Georges Rouault , among others. Another avant-la-lettre reference was Pierre Puvis de Chavannes , a singular painter whose style differs completely from Moreau's baroque symbolism, a classical and serene style that would have been classified as academicist if it were not for

8906-466: The Piano , Girlfriends (or Two Women Friends ), Wally (portrait), The Music (II)". His Nuda Veritas (1899) defined his bid to further "shake up" the establishment. The starkly naked red-headed woman holds the mirror of truth, while above her is a quotation by Friedrich Schiller in stylized lettering: "If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please only a few. To please many

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9052-665: The Sphinx (1864, Metropolitan Museum of Art , New York), Orpheus (1865, Louvre Museum , Paris), Jason and Medea (1865, Musée d'Orsay , Paris), Diomedes devoured by his horses (1870, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen ), The Apparition (1874–1876, Gustave Moreau Museum , Paris), Salome (1876, Gustave Moreau Museum, Paris), Hercules and the Hydra of Lerna (1876, Art Institute of Chicago ), Cleopatra (1887, Louvre Museum, Paris), Jupiter and Semele (1894–1896, Gustave Moreau Museum, Paris). He lived almost in seclusion in his house in

9198-581: The Symbolist movement. The closest roots of symbolism, already in the 19th century, are to be found in Romanticism and some of its offshoots, such as Nazarenism and Pre-Raphaelitism . Already in these movements some of the features of symbolism can be perceived, such as subjectivism, introspection, mysticism, lyrical evocation and attraction to the mysterious and the irrational. Romantic artists such as William Blake , Johann Heinrich Füssli , Caspar David Friedrich , Eugène Delacroix , Philipp Otto Runge , Moritz von Schwind or Ludwig Richter largely prelude

9344-650: The Symbolists showed a special preference for allegory , for the representation of ideas through images evocative of those ideas. For this purpose they often resorted to emblematics , mythology and iconography related to medieval legends and figures from popular folklore, especially in Germanic and Scandinavian countries. Another variant of the occult was the attraction to eroticism, latent in artists such as Moreau or Redon and evident in Rops , Stuck , Klimt , Beardsley or Mossa . Ultimately, this attraction also led to

9490-569: The Vienna Secession, Klimt was the most influenced by Japanese art and its methods. Early in his career, he was a successful painter of architectural decorations in a conventional manner. As he began to develop a more personal style, his work was the subject of controversy that culminated when the paintings he completed around 1900 for the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna were criticized as pornographic. He subsequently accepted no more public commissions, but achieved

9636-438: The allegory of Franz von Stuck 's Sin (1893, Neue Pinakothek , Munich). Some of the women of the period who served as references for symbolist and modernist artists were the dancers Cléo de Mérode , La Bella Otero and Loïe Fuller , as well as the actress Sarah Bernhardt . Fin-de-siecle art—symbolism, modernism—relied on a series of increasingly diverse media for its dissemination, thanks to technological advances and

9782-496: The art market. The art market database Artprice lists 67 auction entries for paintings, but 1564 for drawings and watercolors. The most expensive drawing sold so far was "Reclining Female Nude Facing Left", which was made between 1914 and 1915 and sold in London in 2008 for £505,250 . However, the majority of the art trade traditionally takes place privately through galleries such as Wienerroither & Kohlbacher, which specialize in

9928-622: The artist, who came to live his own life as a work of art-as can be seen in the figure of the dandy . For aesthetes, art should have no didactic, moral, social or political function, but should respond solely to pleasure and beauty. This movement arose in the United Kingdom, cradle of the Industrial Revolution , where in the first half of the 19th century artistic styles—especially in architecture and decorative arts—of eclectic cut such as historicism developed. Against this, an "Aesthetic Discontent" began to emerge, which provoked

10074-456: The assimilated Jewish Viennese Haute bourgeoisie . He cultivated intimate relationships especially with his models from upper class circles. He was considered progressive for his time, because he allowed women an active role in sexuality . Klimt wrote little about his vision or his methods. He wrote mostly postcards to Flöge and kept no diary. In a rare writing called "Commentary on a non-existent self-portrait", he states "I have never painted

10220-424: The choice of his subjects, where the recourse to symbol and allegory as a means of conveying the message is indeed appreciated. He was an outstanding muralista , a procedure that suited him well to develop his preference for cold tones, which gave the appearance of fresco painting . He had a more serene and harmonious style, with an allegorical theme of evocation of an idealized past, simple forms, rhythmic lines and

10366-535: The circle of Maurice Denis and the Nabis, and assiduously attended the salons of the Rosicrucians . Osbert's production focused on a type of bucolic and dreamlike landscapes of ethereal tones, with a preference for blue and mauve, populated by female figures in motionless, contemplative attitude. On most occasions these figures allude to the Muses , dressed in vaporous veils and framed in idyllic landscapes, generally with

10512-519: The critic fr:Charles Morice defined symbolism as the synthesis between the spirit and the senses ( La Littérature de tout à l'heure , 1889). A literary antecedent of this movement was the book Against the Grain (À rebours) by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1884), a hymn to aestheticism and eccentricity as a vital attitude, in which he relates the work of certain artists such as Gustave Moreau , Rodolphe Bresdin and Odilon Redon to decadentism. In this novel

10658-466: The critic and poet Arthur Symons in the magazine Savoy , author of the essay The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1900), where he advocated symbolism as an attempt to spiritualize art and turn it into a religion that would substitute nature for fantasy. Symbolism was closely linked to aestheticism , a philosophical-artistic movement which, against the materialism of the industrial era, opposed

10804-415: The cycle of life. He created a painted portrait of Margarete Wittgenstein , Ludwig Wittgenstein 's sister, on the occasion of her marriage. Then, between 1907 and 1909, Klimt painted five canvases of society women wrapped in fur. His apparent love of costume is expressed in the many photographs of Flöge modeling clothing he had designed. As he worked and relaxed in his home, Klimt normally wore sandals and

10950-474: The darkest side of the human being, but the only one they could rescue. According to art historian Jean Clair , his "aim was to transform the cultural crisis that reached its zenith in the belle époque into a culture of crisis." One of the essential features of symbolism was subjectivity, the exaltation of individualism, of personal temperament, of individual rebellion. Remy de Gourmont said that "symbolism is, although excessive, intemperate and pretentious,

11096-492: The delicate nature of collotype lithography, as well as the necessity for multicolored prints (a feat difficult to reproduce with collotypes), and Klimt's own desire for perfection, the series that was published in mid-1908 was not completed until 1914. Each of the fifty prints was categorized among five themes: The monochrome collotypes as well as the halftone works were printed with a variety of colored inks ranging from sepia to blue and green. Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria

11242-421: The depiction of the occult and the irrational, as opposed to representation, evocation, or suggestion. Just as in poetry the rhythm of words served to express a transcendent meaning, in painting they sought ways for color and line to express ideas. In this movement, all the arts were related and thus the painting of Redon was often compared to the poetry of Baudelaire or the music of Debussy . This style placed

11388-557: The description of reality—a trend generally known as naturalism —such as academicism , Neoclassicism , realism or Impressionism . Some Renaissance artists such as Botticelli and Mantegna exerted a great influence on the Symbolist painters: the former especially in England ( Beardsley , Burne-Jones , Ricketts ) and the latter in France with Moreau and Redon, and even Picasso . Other Renaissance artists who gave great relevance to

11534-467: The ephemerality of life and equality in the face of death. In the Rococo (18th century), a special reference for the Symbolists was Jean-Antoine Watteau , whose works moved away from the conventional symbolic allegory that had been prevalent in the Renaissance and Baroque to explore a more subtle and hidden symbolism, one that must be delved into to understand the artist's intentions and, therefore, closer to

11680-406: The ever-increasing speed of communications. The new art relied on a variety of propagandistic media such as magazines, exhibitions, galleries, advertising posters, illustrated books, production workshops and artists' societies, private schools and academies and other types of promotion and sales channels. The speed of dissemination and reproduction led to both the cosmopolitization of the new style and

11826-482: The exaltation of art and beauty, synthesized in Théophile Gautier 's formula of " art for art's sake " ( l'art pour l'art'), which was even referred to as "aesthetic religion". This position sought to isolate the artist from society, to seek his own inspiration autonomously and to be driven solely by an individual quest for beauty. Beauty was removed from any moral component, becoming the ultimate goal of

11972-553: The exhibition only, the frieze was painted directly on the walls with light materials. The frieze is large, standing at 2.15 m (7 ft 1 in) high with a width of 34.14 m (112.0 ft). The entire work weighs four tons. It is inspired by the composer Richard Wagner 's interpretation of Beethoven's Ninth symphony . The frieze combined Ancient Greek , Byzantine , early medieval , and Japanese art styles, while incorporating Klimt's characteristic use of gold leaf . Its left side begins with genii floating toward

12118-564: The exhibition only, the frieze was painted directly on the walls with light materials. After the exhibition the painting was preserved, although it was not displayed again until restored in 1986. The face on the Beethoven portrait resembled the composer and Vienna Court Opera director Gustav Mahler . In 1905, dissensions within the Secession increased, and when the artistic consultant of the Galerie Mietkhe Carl Moll

12264-534: The exploration of death or illness, as in Munch , Ensor and Strindberg . Another characteristic of Symbolist art was synesthesia , the search for a relationship between pictorial qualities (line, color, rhythm) and other sensory qualities such as sound and scent: Gauguin thus spoke of the "musical aspect" of his art; Rimbaud related vowels to colors (A-black, E-blue, I-red, O-yellow, U-green); Baudelaire also applied colors to perfumes. This interrelation between

12410-667: The expression of individualism in art"; and Odilon Redon was of the opinion that "the future is in a subjective world". This exaltation of individual will entails the absence in this current of distinctive stylistic hallmarks common to all the artists, who are united more by a series of abstract concepts than by an established methodological program. Among these shared concepts are mysticism, religiosity and aestheticism, linked to an idealistic philosophy impregnated with fin-de-siecle pessimism that has its maximum expression in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer . Also common to most of these artists

12556-414: The expression of the idea. 2. Symbolist, for which it will express this idea by means of forms. 3. Synthetist, for which it will present these forms and these signs, according to a method that is comprehensible in general terms. 4. Subjective, for which the object will never be considered as an object but as a sign of an idea perceived by the object. 5.(Consequently it will be) decorative. On the other hand,

12702-426: The fascination with vice and sexual deviance. Symbolist art overexcites the senses, which produces a sense of decadence, which will be the state of mind characteristic of the fin de siècle . Paul Verlaine wrote: I like the word "decadentism". It has a glow of gold and purple. It gives off beams of fire and the glitter of precious stones. Since 1886 a magazine entitled Le Décadent was published in France, which

12848-425: The first artists to declare that the true aim of art was the inner world of mood and emotion, rather than the objective world of outward appearances". To this end, they used the symbol as a vehicle for the expression of their emotions, which took the form of images of strong subjective and irrational content, in which dreams, visions, fantastic worlds recreated by the artist predominate, with a certain tendency towards

12994-455: The five restituted paintings netted more than $ 327 million. The painting Litzlberg am Attersee was auctioned for $ 40.4 million November 2011. Klimt's last painting, Lady with a Fan ( Dame mit Fächer , 1918), was sold by Sotheby's in London on 27 June 2023 for UK£85.3M (US$ 108.4) to a Hong Kong collector, the highest-priced artwork ever sold at auction in Europe. According to

13140-618: The heir of a Jewish family that had its art stolen by the Nazis . The paintings are estimated to be worth at least $ 150 million." This incident, involving Maria Altmann , was subsequently made into the Hollywood movie Woman in Gold , starring Helen Mirren. Later that year, the most notable of the five paintings, 1907's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (also known as “The Woman in Gold”),

13286-402: The highest prices recorded for individual works of art. In November 2003, Klimt's Landhaus am Attersee sold for $ 29,128,000, but that sale was soon eclipsed by prices paid for Willem de Kooning's Woman III and later Klimt's own Adele Bloch-Bauer II , the latter of which sold for $ 150 million in 2016. More frequently than paintings, however, the artist's works on paper can be found on

13432-400: The idea, the latent, the subjective; it is an externalization of the artist's self, hence their interest in intangible concepts, religion, mythology, fantasy, legend, as well as hermeticism, occultism and even Satanism. According to the critic Roger Marx they were artists who sought to "give form to the dream." Against naturalism, artifice is defended, against the modern the primitive, against

13578-463: The landscape, they preferred—as in Romanticism —solitary and nostalgic places, evocative, suggestive, preferably wild and abandoned, unsullied by man, in open, almost infinite horizons. They are not usually empty landscapes, but generally resort to human presence, for which the landscape is a vehicle of evocation or a projection of psychic states. Symbolism, understood as a means of expression of

13724-472: The landscapes are characterized by the same refinement of design and emphatic patterning as the figural pieces. Deep space in the Attersee works is flattened so efficiently to a single plane that it is believed that Klimt painted them by using a telescope. From 1900 Gustav Klimt became famous above all as a "painter of women". He created about one large-format portrait of a woman per year, in which he applied

13870-578: The late 1890s he took annual summer holidays with the Flöge family on the shores of Attersee and painted many of his landscapes there, such as Schloss by the Water . These landscapes constitute the only genre aside from figure painting that seriously interested Klimt. In recognition of his intensity, the locals called him Waldschrat ("forest demon"). Klimt's Attersee paintings are of sufficient number and quality as to merit separate appreciation. Formally,

14016-481: The lavish Stoclet Palace , the home of a wealthy Belgian industrialist that was one of the grandest monuments of the Art Nouveau age. Klimt's contributions to the dining room, including both Fulfillment and Expectation , were some of his finest decorative works, and as he publicly stated, "probably the ultimate stage of my development of ornament." In 1905, Klimt painted The Three Ages of Woman , depicting

14162-406: The morbid and perverse, tormented eroticism, loneliness and existential anguish. In this style, the symbol is an "agent of communication with mystery," allowing the expression of hidden intuitions and mental processes in a way that would not be possible in a conventional medium of expression. The symbol makes manifest the ambiguous, the mysterious, the inexpressible, the hidden. Symbolist art exalts

14308-540: The most existential aspects of life and pessimism as a vital attitude, as well as the evasion and exaltation of the unconscious. Another current linked to symbolism was aestheticism , a reaction to the prevailing utilitarianism of the time and to the ugliness and materialism of the industrial era. Against this, art and beauty were granted their own autonomy, synthesized in Théophile Gautier 's formula "art for art's sake" ( L'art pour l'art ). Some Symbolist artists were also linked to theosophy and esoteric organizations such as

14454-521: The most existential aspects of life and society, with a pessimistic attitude derived from the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard , and a rebellious and anti-social attitude inspired by works such as The Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire and Against the Grain by Huysmans . Their general characteristics are a taste for elegance and fantasy, as well as for the exotic—which is denoted in their predilection for orchids, butterflies or peacocks—a predilection for artificial beauty, while denigrating nature;

14600-475: The multiple tendencies linked to realism in the field of culture throughout the 19th century. Factors such as the progress of science since the Renaissance —which in this century led to scientific positivism , the development of industry and commerce that originated with capitalism and the Industrial Revolution , the preference of the bourgeoisie for cultural naturalism, and the emergence of socialism with its tendency toward philosophical materialism , led to

14746-484: The objective the subjective, against the rational the irrational, against the social order the marginalization, against the conscious the hidden and mysterious. The artist no longer recreates nature, but builds his own world, liberates himself expressively and creatively, aspires to the total work of art , in which he takes care of all the details and becomes an absolute creator. Paul Cézanne considered art as "a harmony parallel to nature"; and Oscar Wilde stated that "art

14892-573: The original works. While the set was released a year after Klimt's death, some art historians suspect he was involved with production planning because of the meticulous nature of the printing (Klimt had overseen the production of the plates for Das Werk Gustav Klimts , making sure each one was to his exact specifications, a level of quality carried through similarly in Fünfundzwanzig Handzeichnungen ). The first ten editions also each contained an original Klimt drawing. Many of

15038-584: The other hand, Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin exerted a powerful influence on the beginnings of Symbolism, thanks to his links with the Pont-Aven School and Cloisonnism . This current was also linked to modernism , known as art nouveau in France, Modern Style in United Kingdom, Jugendstil in Germany, Sezession in Austria or Liberty in Italy. Symbolism emerged as a reaction to

15184-447: The pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer , opposed to the positivism of Auguste Comte , and in the subjectivist philosophy of Henri Bergson and his advice to seek truth through intuition. Another philosophical reference was Friedrich Nietzsche . Besides France, the other country that contributed intense baggage to the theory of symbolism was United Kingdom, the cradle of decadentism. Helping in that field were some articles by

15330-452: The pioneers of abstraction, such as Kandinsky , Malevich , Mondrian and Kupka , had a symbolist phase at the beginning of their work. Fauvist coloring was heir to symbolism, cloisonnism and synthetism , in an evolutionary line that begins with the smooth color without shadows of Puvis de Chavannes , continues with the enameled color and enclosed in black contours of Émile Bernard , color that Gauguin took to its maximum expression and

15476-427: The poet Gustave Kahn noted in 1886 that: The essential aim of our art is to objectify the subjective (the externalization of the idea) rather than to subjectify the objective (nature seen through the eyes of a temperament). In the preface to his Livre des masques (1896), Remy de Gourmont wrote of symbolism: What does symbolism mean? If we stick to the strict and etymological sense, almost nothing; if this limit

15622-507: The portrait First Lady Michelle Obama , by Amy Sherald in 2018, have been noted by art critics to have been influenced by Klimt, in particular the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I . One commentator noted the similarity to fashion designed by Klimt's muse Emilie Louise Flöge . The city of Vienna , Austria had many special exhibitions commemorating the 150th anniversary of Klimt's birth in 2012. Google commemorated Gustav Klimt with

15768-411: The principles of Art Nouveau - flatness, decoration, gold leaf application. At the same time, he devoted himself to allegories and Old Testament heroines, which he transformed, however, into dangerous " femmes fatales ". Eros, sexuality and femininity were variously interpreted by him as alluring danger. Life, love, and death can be determined as the important themes of Klimt's work. Klimt's 'Golden Phase'

15914-729: The protagonist, Jean Floressas des Esseintes, withdraws from the world to live in an environment created by him in which he devotes himself to enjoying literature, music, art, flowers, jewels, perfumes, liquors and all those things that stimulate an idealized existence, removed from the mundane noise. As his title indicates, the character lives "against the grain of common sense, of moral sense, of reason, of nature." The protagonist fills his house with symbolist works of art, which he defines as "evocative works of art that will transport him to an unknown world, opening up new possibilities and agitating his nervous system by means of erudite fantasies, complicated nightmares and soft, sinister visions." This book

16060-622: The repertoire for nearly fifty years. It was shown in 265 performances and went on tour to Florence , Washington and twice to Japan. In 2006 an Austrian art-house biographical film about his life, Klimt , was released with John Malkovich in the lead role. In 2008 the Couturier John Galliano found inspiration for the Christian Dior Spring-Summer 2008 haute couture collection in Klimt's work. The 2019 collection of designer Alexander McQueen

16206-417: The representation of an illusory space, gravity, the three-dimensional appearance. Among the motifs favored by the Symbolists are traditional themes—though frequently reinterpreted—and newly invented ones. Among the former are portraits , landscapes and narrative painting of tales and legends, which serve as new avenues for symbolizing concepts such as love, loneliness, nostalgia, etc. Symbolist portraiture

16352-506: The research project to this day. Since 1990, Marian Bisanz-Prakken has redefined, documented, and scientifically processed around 400 further drawings. This makes the Albertina Vienna the only institution in the world that has been examining and scientifically classifying the artist's works for half a century. The research project now includes information on over 4,300 works by Gustav Klimt. Klimt's paintings have brought some of

16498-517: The senses was theorized by Baudelaire in his Correspondence (1857), in which he defended the expressiveness of art as a means of satisfying all the senses simultaneously. On the other hand, the Lithuanian Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis , who was a painter and composer, created a theory whereby color was the point of union between the various arts, which in painting was the link between the various motifs and in music

16644-467: The style developed by the Symbolist artists. Another precedent usually considered is Francisco de Goya , an artist somewhere between Rococo and Romanticism—rather an unclassifiable genius—who preluded Symbolism in works such as The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799, Museo del Prado , Madrid). Romanticism was an innovative movement that was the first fracture against the main engine driving modern times: reason. According to Isaiah Berlin , there

16790-664: The subject of the dramatic film the Woman in Gold , a movie inspired by Stealing Klimt , the documentary featuring Maria Altmann herself. The portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II was sold at auction in November 2006 for $ 88 million, the third-highest priced piece of art at auction at the time. The Apple Tree I (c. 1912) sold for $ 33 million, Birch Forest (1903) sold for $ 40.3 million, and Houses in Unterach on Lake Atter (1916) sold for $ 31 million. Collectively,

16936-399: The symbolic content of their works were Giorgione , Titian and Albrecht Dürer , who were also admired by the 19th century symbolists. A certain degree of symbolism is also seen in the work of Baroque artists such as Rubens and Claude Lorrain , as well as in a genre widely treated at this time, that of the vanitas , whose purpose is by definition always symbolic: to remind the viewer of

17082-418: The theoretical level, it drew on the work of thinkers and philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche , who pointed to the symbol as the basis of art; Henri Bergson , who opposed objective reality and defended its subjective perception; and Arthur Schopenhauer , whose book The World as Will and Representation (1819) powerfully influenced fin-de-siècle pessimism. One of the characteristics of decadentism

17228-404: The three-volume catalogue raisonné, which records and describes all drawings by Gustav Klimt known at the time in chronological order. An additional supplementary volume was published in 1989. In the following year Strobl transferred her work to the art historian and curator Marian Bisanz-Prakken , who had assisted her since 1975 in the determination and classification of the works and who continues

17374-471: The time, Hans Makart . Klimt readily accepted the principles of a conservative training; his early work may be classified as academic. In 1877 his brother, Ernst, who, like his father, would become an engraver, also enrolled in the school. The two brothers and their friend, Franz Matsch, began working together and by 1880 they had received numerous commissions as a team that they called the "Company of Artists". They also helped their teacher in painting murals in

17520-667: The town halls of Paris and Poitiers , the Panthéon , the Sorbonne and the Boston Public Library , among others. His monumental style was based on the absence of depth, constructive linearity and compositional majesty, as well as the philosophical reflection inherent in his scenes. In 1890 he founded with Rodin , Carrière and Meissonnier the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts, which organized various exhibitions of young artists and new trends until 1910. Odilon Redon

17666-511: The trade with original works by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele and regularly present these at monographic exhibitions and international art fairs. In 2006, the 1907 portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer I , was purchased for the Neue Galerie New York by Ronald Lauder reportedly for US$ 135 million, surpassing Picasso 's 1905 Boy With a Pipe (sold 5 May 2004 for $ 104 million), as the highest reported price ever paid for

17812-412: The ultimate goal of the artist. Thus, symbolist poetry is based on preciosity and sensuality, on lyrical effects that sparkle like precious stones, and art seeks the suggestiveness of the image, the richness of the symbol, the sensual aesthetic that they draw even from elements such as vice and perversion, which are refined to achieve an image of strong visual impact. A parallel phenomenon to aestheticism

17958-418: The work. After the Secession Building built a climate-controlled basement room in 1985, the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere permanently loaned the piece, publicly displaying the piece since 1986. In 2020, museum visitors were provided with headphones to hear Beethoven's Ninth Symphony while viewing the frieze in celebration of the composer's 250th birthday. In 2013, some members of the Lederer family filed

18104-496: The works contained in this volume depict erotic scenes of nude women, some of whom are masturbating alone or are coupled in sapphic embraces. When a number of the original drawings were exhibited to the public, at Galerie Miethke in 1910 and the International Exhibition of Prints and Drawings in Vienna in 1913, they were met by critics and viewers who were hostile towards Klimt's contemporary perspective. There

18250-456: The writer Frank Whitford: "Klimt of course, is an important artist—he's a very popular artist—but in terms of the history of art, he's a very unimportant artist. Although he sums up so much in his work, about the society in which he found himself—in art historical terms his effect was negligible. So he's an artist really in a cul-de-sac." Klimt's work had a strong influence on the paintings of Egon Schiele , with whom he would collaborate to found

18396-616: Was dandyism , in which the cult of beauty is carried over to one's own body: dandies wear elegant clothes, are overly concerned with their personal image, are interested in fashion and seek to keep up with the latest fashions in dress; they are fond of accessories, such as hats, gloves and walking sticks. In general, they are urban characters, of bourgeois origin—although sometimes they renounce this distinction—often with liberal professions and fond of technological novelties. In terms of character, they tended to be haughty and confrontational, and liked to be admired and even regarded as celebrities. As

18542-478: Was "a shift of consciousness that split the backbone of European thought." For the Romantics, the objective world of the senses had no validity, so they turned to its antithesis: subjectivity. Artists turned to their inner world, it was their own temperament that dictated the rules and not society. Faced with academic rules, they gave primacy to the imagination, which would be the new vehicle of expression. All this

18688-422: Was a pupil of Stanislas Gorin, Jean-Léon Gérôme , Rodolphe Bresdin and Henri Fantin-Latour . He developed a fantastic and dreamlike subject matter, influenced by the literature of Edgar Allan Poe , which largely preceded surrealism . Until the age of fifty he worked almost exclusively in charcoal drawing and lithography , although he later showed himself to be an excellent colorist in both oil and pastel, with

18834-467: Was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. Klimt is noted for his paintings, murals , sketches , and other objets d'art . Klimt's primary subject was the female body, and his works are marked by a frank eroticism. Amongst his figurative works, which include allegories and portraits, he painted landscapes . Among the artists of

18980-545: Was an audience for Klimt's erotic drawings, however, and fifteen of his drawings were selected by Viennese poet Franz Blei for his translation of Hellenistic satirist Lucian 's Dialogues of the Courtesans . The book, limited to 450 copies, provided Klimt with the opportunity to show these more lurid depictions of women and avoided censorship thanks to an audience composed of a small group of (mostly male) affluent patrons. Composed in 1931 by editor Max Eisler and printed by

19126-433: Was an image of the divine cosmic order . Symbolist painting advocated memory composition as opposed to the à plein air painting advocated by Impressionism . One of its essential features was the line, in sinuous contours of organic appearance, a fluid and dynamic, stylized line, in which representation passes from naturalism to analogy. It reclaims the two-dimensionality inherent to painting, abandoning perspective and

19272-401: Was attacked by colleagues of the Secession for his work, a strong controversy arose which created a real internal split, led by Klimt. The following year, Klimt formed the group called "Kunstschau" (Art Show) or "Klimt group", which also included Moll and Otto Wagner , among other important Austrian artists. During this period Klimt did not confine himself to public commissions. Beginning in

19418-598: Was considered the "Bible of decadentism", the revelation of the fin de siècle feeling. Symbolism was spread by numerous magazines such as La Revue wagnerienne (1885), Le Symbolisme (1886), La Plume (1889), La Revue blanche (1891) and, especially, La Pléiade (1886, renamed in 1889 as Mercure de France ), which was the official organ of symbolism. In the latter magazine the critic Gabriel-Albert Aurier in 1891 defined Symbolist painting as idealist, symbolist, synthetist, subjective and decorative : The work of art will be: 1. Idealist, for which its only ideal will be

19564-425: Was in a way the official organ of this movement. In its first issue, on April 10, 1886, it announced to society the decadence of values such as morality, religion and justice, and pointed out symptoms of the process of social involution such as history, neurosis, hypnotism and drug dependence. Decadentism was an anti-bourgeois and anti-naturalist movement, which defended luxury, pleasure and hypersensitivity of taste. On

19710-456: Was influenced by artists such as Leonardo , Mantegna and Delacroix , as well as Indian art , Byzantine art and Greco-Roman mosaic. His works are of fantastic cut and ornamental style, with variegated compositions densely populated with all kinds of objects and vegetal elements, with a suggestive eroticism that reflects his fears and obsessions, in which he portrays a prototype of ambiguous woman, between innocence and perversity: Oedipus and

19856-540: Was linked to Expressionism , especially thanks to figures such as Edvard Munch and James Ensor . On the other hand, some schools or artistic associations such as the Pont-Aven School or the group of the Nabis are considered symbolist or directly related to symbolism. They were also heirs to some extent of Neo-Impressionism , whose puntillist technique was the first to break with Impressionist naturalism. On

20002-645: Was marked by positive critical reaction and financial success. Many of his paintings from this period included gold leaf . Klimt had previously used gold in his Pallas Athene (1898) and Judith I (1901), although the works most popularly associated with this period are the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) and The Kiss (1907–08). Klimt traveled in all Europe, mainly to present his works on occasion of international exhibitions, but trips to Venice and Ravenna , both famous for their beautiful mosaics, most likely inspired his gold technique and his Byzantine imagery . In 1904, he collaborated with other artists on

20148-625: Was partially inspired by Klimt. Gustav Klimt and his work have been the subjects of many collector coins and medals, such as the 100 Euro Painting Gold Coin , issued on 5 November 2003, by the Austrian Mint . The obverse depicts Klimt in his studio with two unfinished paintings on easels. Tawny Chatmon , an American photographic artist known for her portraits of Black children overlaid with gold leaf and paint, has sought to place Black figures in glittering gold clothing inspired by Klimt's lavish portraits of white Viennese women. Elements of

20294-539: Was published initially by H. O. Miethke (of Galerie Miethke, Klimt's exclusive gallery in Vienna) from 1908 to 1914 in an edition of 300, supervised personally by the artist. The first thirty-five editions (I-XXXV) each included an original drawing by Klimt, and the next thirty-five editions (XXXVI–LXX) each with a facsimile signature on the title page. Fifty images depicting Klimt's most important paintings (1893–1913) were reproduced using collotype lithography and mounted on

20440-464: Was set up by Ursula Ucicky, widow of Klimt's illegitimate son Gustav Ucicky , with a mission to "preserve and disseminate Gustav Klimt's legacy." The managing director of the Leopold Museum , Peter Weinhäupl, was appointed as chairman of the foundation. As a reaction, the museum's director Tobias G. Natter resigned in protest, citing Ucicky's past as a Nazi propaganda film-maker. In 2000,

20586-560: Was sold at auction for $ 135 million (at the time, the highest price ever paid for a single painting). The winning bidder was art collector Ronald S. Lauder , founder of Neue Galerie in New York, where it remains on display. Symbolist painting In painting, symbolism was a fantastic and dreamlike style that emerged as a reaction to the naturalism of the realist painting and Impressionist trends, whose objectivity and detailed description of reality were opposed by subjectivity and

20732-482: Was sold to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1964. Industrialist August Lederer was encouraged by his wife, Serena , to acquire the frieze and many of these sketches in 1915. During the 1938 German annexation of Austria , the widowed Serena Lederer was forced to abandon her art collection as she fled to Hungary to avoid Nazi persecution for her Jewish origin. After the painting was recovered by Allied forces from

20878-419: Was the cradle of symbolism, both in painting and in poetry and other artistic genres. Gustave Moreau can be considered the father of pictorial symbolism; in any case, his work predates the emergence of "official" symbolism by two decades, since from the 1860s Moreau was already painting pictures in which he recreated his particular world of luxurious and detailed fantasy, with themes based on mythology, history and

21024-461: Was the first to purchase a folio set of Das Werk Gustav Klimts in 1908. Fünfundzwanzig Handzeichnungen ("Twenty-five Drawings") was released the year after Klimt's death. Many of the drawings in the collection were erotic in nature and just as polarizing as his painted works. Published in Vienna in 1919 by Gilhofer & Ranschburg, the edition of 500 features twenty-five monochrome and two-color collotype reproductions, nearly indistinguishable from

21170-405: Was to be his companion until the end of his life. His painting, The Kiss (1907–08), is thought to be an image of them as lovers which was painted five years after Klimt's 1902 full-length portrait of her. He designed many costumes that she produced and modeled in his works. During this period, Klimt fathered at least fourteen children. Klimt became one of the founding members and president of

21316-613: Was transmitted by Sérusier to the Nabis ; the leading exponent of Fauvism, Henri Matisse , revealed that his painting Luxury I was inspired by Girls by the Sea by Puvis de Chavannes. Expressionism considered artists such as Paul Gauguin , Edvard Munch or James Ensor as immediate antecedents, and some expressionist artists had an early symbolist phase, such as Georges Rouault , Alfred Kubin , Egon Schiele , Oskar Kokoschka , Franz Marc and Vasili Kandinsky . Futurism, although theoretically opposed to symbolism, received its influence to

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