Enhance
your Experience of the National Gallery's Klimt Exhibit - Use The Internet.
June 19th, 2001 Lindsay Fraser
Introduction
On the cusp of the eighties and the nineties, I had the wonderful opportunity of living in Vienna for a couple of years. Our first apartment fell through at the last minute and we had to house-sit for the first few months of our time in Vienna. The house that we "sat on" was in fact a penthouse apartment (or dachboden) situated in the heart of Vienna's first district. The couple who lived in this apartment loved Vienna, and in particular they loved the work of Gustave Klimt. The entranceway to the apartment sported an enormous reproduction of Klimt's work Judith I (known to many as Judith und Holofernes). Their living room held an equally enormous reproduction of the extremely well known "The Kiss". Now everyone needs to recall that this was before Klimt's work became a mainstay of poster shops in the mid Nineties.
Given this background, how could I be anything but ecstatic when I heard on the radio that the National Gallery of Canada was about to hold an exhibit of Klimt's work?
Background
As of the 15th of June, the National Gallery of Canada is featuring an exhibit of the works of Gustav Klimt. The exhibit features 35 paintings and 90 drawings and is the first retrospective of the artist's work to be held in North America. In addition to the exhibit, there will be numerous events and activities including a number of really interesting looking lectures with titles like "Gustav Klimt: Modernism in the Making" and "Cosmos and Pysche: Klimt, Mahler, and the artists of the Kunstschau". If this sounds a little too intellectual for you then you might want to attend the "Klimt Fashion Show" by students of the Richard Robinson Academy of Fashion Design. If none of the above is to your taste then how about a Klimt inspired concert series? On the National Gallery Web site you can visit a "visual preview" of the exhibit which will give you a taste of some of the works you will see. I noticed that Pallas Athene, which is a glorious painting, is just one of the works in this exhibit that is on loan from the Art History Museum in Vienna. There is also a section of the Web site, that I was very excited about, called "Behind the Scenes". Sadly this section is completely empty, but promises that some time in June there will be interviews with the National Gallery Creative Team about the making of the Klimt exhibition. This should be a very interesting section, as I understand that it was quite a challenge to put this exhibit together.
Though the National Gallery site was beautifully designed, it was disappointing in that it served only to promote its own exhibit and events. I had hoped that there would be biographical information about Klimt and perhaps information about his influence on the art of his time. Sadly there was nothing of the sort, not even links to other locations on the Internet for such information. This lack, is likely a reflection of the problem that the National Gallery currently has with so much of its staff out on strike. So I was compelled to sneak off to search tools such as Yahoo and Google to find out what I could about this great man.
Online Galleries of Klimt's Work
In looking for a site on the Internet that would take me on a tour of all of Klimt's work, I came across a very interesting site called the Gustav Klimt Art Gallery . (I must, as an aside, mention that this site is a personal Web site and it sits on a Magma.ca server - Magma is an Ottawa-based Internet provider.) This site features 114 works painted by Klimt between 1890 and 1918. The works are sorted thematically and each image can be selected for a larger view along with a modicum of information. I particularly liked the section about the extremely famous Beethoven frieze, of which I had only seen little bits before. Here each section of the frieze has been broken out with a short explanation of the associated symbolism. The great disappointment about this Web site is that there seems to be some limit on the number of bytes that can be transferred from that site in a 30 minute period. After only looking at about a third of what the site had to offer I was given a message that read "this website has exceeded its 30 minute transfer allotment".
For more sites that feature a gallery of Klimt's work try the Web Museum , or the Artcyclopedia site which provides links to over 30 sites that feature the works of Gustav Klimt.
The Stories Behind the Paintings
I had always thought of the painting of Judith und Holofernes as simply a portrait of a glorious, seductive and provocative woman resplendent in gold. It was my mother who pointed out to me, in disgust at my total ignorance of the biblical reference, that the painting was of something else altogether. A little research on the Internet taught me that Judith was a rich widow, known for her beauty and respected for her devotion to God. When her town of Bethulia was besieged by the Assyrian army under Holofernes, Judith deceived Holofernes with a false report about the situation in her town. Invited to a private party with Holofernes, she waited until he got drunk and chopped his head off. The next day Bethulian soldiers, armed with the head of the enemy's commander, drove the Assyrian army away. Wow, what an ugly story! Revisiting the painting, knowing the story, I now see an exhausted yet self-satisfied woman incompletely clad no doubt as a result of having to submit to Holofernes "private party". I also notice that the arm, bent at the elbow and crossing her body to a blurred and darkened area of the painting actually holds, at the very edge of the canvas, the bloody and hairy head of a man.
Interestingly there is a second painting by Klimt called "Judith II". This painting seems also to be known by the name "Salome" and it also depicts a partially clad, dark haired beauty, clasping the severed head of John the Baptist. Again though, the head is only partially exposed on the canvas and largely obscured by shadow.
History of The Man
"If you cannot please everyone with your art, please a few. To please many is bad."
Dramatist Schiller
- included in the Klimt work, "Nuda Veritas".
Klimt was a painter of frescos, of landscapes, of portraits and of themes as well as a prodigious sketcher. In his early days, Klimt painted frescos in such Viennese landmarks as the Burgtheatre and the Museum of Fine Arts. In those days, working with his brother, his art was very much "historicist" in flavour. Later though, as his style and personal ethos changed, his work carried much deeper messages and began to cause eyebrows to raise. In fact, his paintings of "philosophy" and "medicine" evoked such a storm of protest that he withdrew himself from a commission he had already been given to paint frescos at Vienna University. (The university Congress conducted a poll and Klimt was condemned for "pornography" and "excessive perversion".) This intense opposition did not intimidate Klimt. In his next work, called Goldfish, the foreground was dominated by one of his typically gorgeous and sensuous women showing her backside to the audience - it is said that he wanted to call the painting "To My Critics".
As time progressed Klimt became more and more of a radical and, in 1897, together with other rebellious young painters, architects and decorators, he founded a movement in Vienna called the Association of the Secession of Pictorial Artists (referred to now as the Secession). The movement was called "Secessionist" because these young artists began by "seceding" from the traditional Artists' Association which they considered too "official" and mediocre, and from the esthetic of historicism favored by Emporer Franz-Joseph which they considered thoroughly decadent. In 1905, after endless arguing between the "artists" and the "builders" (who wanted to merge art and practical items for the purposes of business) Klimt stepped down as President of the association.
The Austrian Tourist board maintains an excellent Web site that provides an introduction to "Art Nouveau in Austria". It is an interesting site for the Klimt fan because it does a good job of introducing the neophyte to the history of Art Nouveau (known as Jugendstil) within the Viennese context. In addition to Klimt, the site features short biographies and featured works of such influential artists and artisans as Otto Wagner, Kolomon Moser, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka and Josef Hoffman. I also particularly enjoyed the section of the site called "In The Footsteps of Jugendstil in Austria". Here you can see photographs of some of the major Art Nouveau-influenced buildings around Austria. I particularly enjoyed the collection of photographs (http://www.austria-tourism.at/eindex/jugendstil.html) of most of my favourite places in Vienna. If I have any complaint about this site it is that the information is on the light side (I would have liked more detail) and the photographs are rather small.
In search of better photographs of Vienna, and the Secession building in particular, I found an excellent site with gorgeous photographs called simply "Welcome to Vienna". All of the photographs on this site can be clicked on in order to pull up a larger version of the image. If you have never seen the Wiener Secession building I highly recommend these photographs - they are gorgeous - and in seeing the building you will suddenly understand the influence of, and the influences on, Klimt.
For more information about Klimt and the Secession visit the following article hosted at the "Birth of Modern Europe" site. Here you will find many other short articles about Vienna, its history and its culture.
You may also be interested in seeing what has happened to Klimt's Secession. The Wiener Secession Web site can be found at http://www.secession.at/e.html. Here you are able to find out what the Secession Association of Artists is doing today, look into upcoming exhibitions and read a little of the history of Klimt's famous Beethoven Frieze.
The Best Klimt Site on the Internet
Of all the sites I found on the Internet that related to Klimt, the "hands down" winner in terms of appearance, mood and information was iKlimt . This is a fantastic full multi -media site (you need Flash I believe) featuring a chronology, biography, drawings and paintings from Klimt's life.
If you work your way through all of the paintings in the iKlimt gallery, you will come to a final painting called "The Bride". This unfinished painting was left on an easel in his studio and found after his death. It is a very interesting exercise to take the magnifying tool that is built into this gorgeous Web site and look in great detail at the unfinished areas, with the sketches behind them, trying to determine where Klimt was going to take the painting. If you read the excellent biography of Klimt at the same site, you will find that Klimt in fact painted women nude before covering them with clothes. This "secret" was revealed after his death when "The Bride" was discovered.
Another work that I had never seen but found on the iKlimt site, is a beautiful canvas called "Women Friends" that portrays a lesbian couple. Apparently, this work was one of many of Klimt's pieces that were destroyed by retreating German troops in 1945.
Because of their bold colours and "Art Nouveau" look, Klimt's works are often seen as purely decorative, eye candy as much as anything else. It has been my experience that if they are investigated in sufficient detail many of his seemingly innocuous works do in fact contain much more macabre and serious messages.
Looking through the chronologically organized painting gallery on the iKlimt site, which is accompanied by the most beautiful and moving piano music of Erik Satie (Third Gymnopedie), you can see a change in his paintings. One of the last paintings shown is called Death and Life, which he in fact began in an earlier period but when he returned to it he painted over that signature gold background and replaced it with a black background. In this painting a column of human figures, ranging from a young mother and children to a grandmother to a man in his prime, are all confronted with a terrifying anthropomorphic rendering of Death. Similarly the painting Hope (which is in fact owned by the National Gallery of Canada), while featuring a beautifully pregnant red-headed woman in the foreground, depicts disturbing images of pain and death and sorrow in the background.
I cannot suggest strongly enough that if you are interested in Gustav Klimt you should visit this site. The detailed biography contains photographs of his birth house, his passport, his grave, his friends, his loves and more. The chronology is a fascinating discovery of the man and how he was influenced by his time.
Conclusion
If the exhibit and the background material available on the Internet is not enough for you then you might want to go and see a new film called Bride of the Wind. This film set in turn of the century Vienna, while not about Klimt exactly, is about Alma Schindler, the woman who at various times was involved with Mahler, Klimt, Kokoschka and others. For a review see http://www.canoe.ca/JamMoviesReviewsB/brideofthewind_braun-sun.html .
Lindsay Fraser is a Senior e-Solutions Strategist for Burntsand Inc. and great appreciator of Gustav Klimt. She can be reached at lfraser@burntsand.com or by telephone at 613-940-2172.
2013 - Lindsay Fraser is The Naked IM Professional and can be reached through this blog.
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