Vienna: Upper Belvedere Museum
The Upper Belvedere Palace, the former home to Prince Eugene of Savoy that dates back to around 1717 is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The palace itself houses a permanent art collection with the world’s largest Gustav Klimt collection that includes important works from the Art Nouveau period such as “The Kiss” and “Judith”.
“The Kiss”, 1907 by Gustav Klimt
This painting is his most popular and well known work and has been on my bucket list to see for years. It exceeded all expectations. It was stunningly beautiful. The post-Victorian society of the early 1900s perceived "The Kiss" as pornographic, even though both figures are fully robed. Despite the public outcry it generated, it sold before the artist had completely finished it. The Belvedere Museum of Vienna, Austria, was the purchaser. The sale price of 25,000 crowns - roughly $240,000 in contemporary U.S. currency - was five times higher than that of any painting previously sold in Vienna. But that price turned out to be a bargain. Klimt’s less renowned (though still quite famous) Adele Bloch-Bauer I sold for $135 million in 2006. The New York Times noted at that time this was "the highest sum ever paid for a painting."
"The Kiss" is the final painting of Klimt's Gold Period, during which he incorporated gold leaf into his works. This practice reflects the strong influence of the gold-detailed religious art of the Middle Ages as well as the sacred works created by artists of the Byzantine Empire. As a result, some considered such paintings to be sacrilegious. "The Kiss" is a ménage of different schools of art. The gold leaf hearkens back to such Byzantine artworks as the mosaics in the Church of San Vitale. The composition of the work reflects the influence of Japanese prints that was also evident in some earlier Impressionist paintings. The contrasting patterns of the two lovers' cloaks reflects the Arts and Crafts movement of the era and overall, Klimt imbued "The Kiss" with elements of his signature Art Nouveau style.
Portrait of Judith, 1901 by Gustav Klimt
Judith was the biblical heroine who seduced and then decapitated General Holofernes in order to save her home city of Bethulia from destruction by the enemy, the Assyrian army. The subject was quite popular from the Middle Ages onwards, as an example of virtue overcoming vice. However, this work is not timeless allegory, since Judith is depicted as a Viennese society beauty. The model was Adele Bloch-Bauer and if you compare it with her portrait it is easy to see the facial similarity. Judith's sensuality and her orgasmic expression as she holds up the head of Holofernes shocked Vienna. The Viennese could not bring themselves to see this brazen femme fatale, who is clearly taking pleasure in her actions, as the pious Jewish widow who risked her virtue in order to save her city. A far more acceptable solution was to insist that this was a picture of the murderess Salome, despite its being titled on the frame as Judith, and for a long time the painting was erroneously known as 'Salome'.
Judith herself has in a sense been decapitated. The heavy gold choker she wears, fashionable in early twentieth-century Vienna, rather brutally separates her own head from her body. Her clothes half conceal, half reveal her body. The stylized gold band at te bottom of the picture looks as if it might be an ornamental hem to her garment, but then cuts across her abdomen like a flat belt. The painting was bought almost immediately by Klimt's Swiss contemporary, the painter Ferdinand Hodler (1853 - 1918), whose work Klimt much admired.
Portrait of Sonja Knips, 1889 by Gustav Klimt
The Portrait of Sonja Knips was in many senses a breakthrough painting for Gustav Klimt. The period preceding it - some five years of relative inactivity - had been one of consolidation and growth, as the artist slowly weaned himself from his academic background and struggled toward his own revolutionary style. The portrait marked a firm break with the glamorous - but implicitly decadent - world of the theater, in which he had made his early name, and his first significant entry into the social stratum that fostered the rise of the Secession and later the Wiener Werkstatte. As a privately commissioned work, the painting also heralded Klimt's progressive withdrawal from the public arena of his previous activity as a muralist. It was the first in the long series of portraits depicting society ladies that was to become the mainstay of the artist's later reputation and economic well-being. Whereas formerly his work had been more or less evenly divided between male and female subjects, he was hereafter to paint women almost exclusively.
The Sunflower, 1907 by Gustav Klimt
The Sunflower is unusual in Klimt's paintings of trees and flowers in that there seems to be a certain anthropomorphic element. The shape and leaves in The Sunflower is remarkably like the form of the lovers in The Kiss. The two works were exhibited for the first time in 1908 at the Art Show Vienna.
Unlike the earlier landscapes from around 1898 to 1902, the painting of sunflowers are no longer concerned with mood; rather, Klimt is fascinated in a more objective way by the organic life that simply exists, independent of human intervention. The geometrical composition of his painting is no longer merely used for decorative effect, but to reinforce the artist's deatched observation of the scene while delighting in the opulence and abundance of nature.
Avenue of Schloss Kammer Park, 1912 by Gustav Klimt
While Klimt's first landscapes date from the early 1880s, it was not until the late 1890s that he turned consistently to landscape subjects, during summer vacations spent in the picturesque Salzkammergut, outside the city of Salzburg. Landscape painting enabled him to experiment, free from the pressure of commissioned work and the distractions of the metropolis. After the early 1900s, when Klimt eschewed large public commissions and became more dependent upon selling his work, a ready supply of new landscapes proved useful.
Adam and Eve, 1917 by Gustav Klimt
Adam and Eve was Klimt's first biblical painting. Certainly, it was the only one to present humankind in a state of grace, for the scene would seem to be set before the Fall, perhaps at the moment of Eve's creation. As the sole truly chaste woman, Eve is a heroine very different from Judith. Klimt's contemporaries remarked that his ideal woman generally departed significantly from the Viennese notion of beauty: she was slender rather than buxom, redhaired or brunette rather than blond. This "Old Testament type" (as Klimt's typical heroine was euphemistically called) had an aura of exoticism that was both appealing and intentionally frightening. A sword that cut both ways, his conception of the femme fatale indulged latent anti-Semitic fears while at the same time glorifying the very subject of those fears. It is not surprising that, for this reason (and because many of his patrons were Jewish), Klimt was subject to anti-Semitic attacks. Be that as it may, it is curious to note that when he chose his model for the mother of the human race, he picked a blond - one of the few to appear in his paintings.
There are other aspects of Adam and Eve that distinguish it from the rest of Klimt's oeuvre. In "The Kiss" the man dominates, here it is Eve who is pushed to the forefront. He decided to position both figures facing forward so that their faces could be seen (another departure from the prior works). As a result, Adam has more presence than most of Klimt's male characters, though his role is hardly a strong one. In a curious reversal of the usual symbolism, the man is passive, somnolent, while the woman is active, awake.
Klimt was gradually breaking out of the fin-de-siecle stereotypes of sexuality to embrace a broader and more original vision.
