Original subtitles

Gustav Klimt is another of the Post-Impressionist generation who had a totally unique style

that doesn't fit neatly in a single box.

Many don't technically classify him as a Post-Impressionist, as he was an Austrian and

much more associated with the Vienna Secession movement that began in the late 1890s.

But, undoubtedly, Klimt's work was strongly influenced by symbolism and the cloison style,

and to some degree, Nabi and Japanese art as well.

He's also a great figure to study because, a bit like Pissarro, his career spans two worlds.

In Klimt's case, we see the transition from Post-Impressionism to Art Nouveau and the

Secession movements, about to sweep the German-speaking world.

Klimt was born to a large, middle-class family near Vienna in 1862.

His father was a goldsmith, which is a little bit of foreshadowing for you.

Gustav and his brother Ernst seemed to have a natural gift for drawing early on.

So, his good parents enrolled him at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna.

This is a bit different than, say, École de Beaux-Arts.

This was more of an arts and crafts school, rather than a purely fine arts school.

This meant that Gustav and his brother were learning figure painting and those kind of things,

but they're also learning crafts or the applied arts—patterning, design, wallpaper, furniture,

decorative arts.

This instilled in him a love for craft that would influence the rest of his career.

Later, he would say that he wanted to get rid of the distinction between art and craft,

as he saw them as one and the same.

He helped this to become a very fashionable idea in Austria and Germany.

While in school, his teachers were so impressed with Gustav and Ernst and another friend they

worked with, Franz Match, that they started recommending the three for prestigious commissions,

like really big national commissions.

And just like that, they became successful mural painters before they even finished school.

Most of the commissions were for murals in public buildings.

They painted in a traditional and classical style, and they were extremely good at it.

Their most prominent commission was to paint the ceiling and staircase at the Berg Theater in Vienna.

This was a large and complicated mural depicting the history of art from ancient Greek to the Renaissance.

Sampling a variety of styles used throughout history, they showed the evolution of art over the centuries.

This was an incredible feat of technical skill—a large ceiling painting with hundreds of figures

through multiple time periods of history, adopting different techniques according to the time he's illustrating.

I couldn't even imagine the amount of research, sketching, composing, and studying was required,

let alone painting the damn thing.

Gustav, Ernst, and Match finished this mural in only two years.

This kind of artistic accomplishment does not go unnoticed.

Gustav was awarded the Golden Order of Merit by none other than the Austro-Hungarian ruler himself, Franz Joseph.

Gustav Klimt had an almost supernatural ability to quickly and effortlessly render form,

value, and volume on any subject and in any style presented to him.

He was a young savant.

Whatever he saw, he could create.

This kind of historical, classical painting seen here in The Allegory of Sculpture is what thrust him to the top.

In this image, he's painted the illusion of sculpted marble alongside another black sculpture at the bottom

and then a real live human standing in front with a bronze figure in her hands, all in front of the architectural details.

Of course, they're all idealized and stylized, but he's showing everyone there was literally nothing he couldn't paint.

He's really just flaunting his talent here at the young age of 27.

He painted many, many, many women over his lifetime.

Most of his work includes them in some way.

He was particularly famous for jaw-dropping portraits of young, beautiful women,

and soon many high society ladies wanted their portraits painted by Clint.

These portraits were so popular and so well received that this turned out to be a very good,

steady source of income and helped him build an excellent Rolodex of contacts

of some of the most richest and powerful women in Vienna.

Thankfully, he was not just a Xerox machine and behind his technical abilities,

he was incredibly creative and bursting with new ideas.

Soon, he was getting inspired by Japanese prints and the symbolist movement

and seeing all the new work being produced by the Post-Impressionists in Paris.

This is where we start to see his own unique style emerge.

Now, it's important to remember Vienna was an extremely conservative city compared to Paris.

In fact, the writer Karl Krauss called it the laboratory of the apocalypse.

And Hitler, Trotsky, and Freud all lived in Vienna and even went to the same coffee houses prior to World War I.

At the same time, a bit like Berlin, it was being shaken up by a progressive group of artists,

writers, architects, musicians, and scientists—a new golden age that would shape the 20th century.

Suffice it to say, there was a lot happening in Vienna at the time,

and Gustav seemed to be channeling much of this energy into his paintings.

In 1892, his father and brother Ernst died unexpectedly,

and he didn't paint much while he was grieving.

And when he did finally come back, he seems to have lost interest in the classical painting

or the types of murals he'd done with Ernst that made him famous.

This tragedy seemed to trigger a new confidence to pursue his unique vision and let the world be damned.

Several years later, he was commissioned to paint murals for the University of Vienna.

They knew Klimt, of course, for his award-winning mural on the ceiling of the Berg Theater.

And that's the kind of painting they were expecting.

They gave him the themes of jurisprudence, philosophy, and medicine.

However, the committee didn't know what Gustav had been up to the last few years and his change of heart.

And what they got was much more shocking than anything they were expecting.

His murals caused a scandal as he was accused of painting blasphemy, pornography,

and denigrating the sacred pillars of their university.

Eventually, they were destroyed in World War II and were only left with color pencil studies and black and white photos.

Granted, these paintings were weird and more abstract.

The figures were not classically beautiful nudes.

They were contorted, gaunt, and overtly sexual.

They weren't glorifying the university.

They were presenting difficult and obtuse imagery.

His representation of jurisprudence is this accused man being grasped by a giant octopus,

surrounded by awkwardly cramped and judgmental female onlookers in a dark, swirling sea.

Not exactly the kind of inspiration they had in mind for young law students at the university.

And, if that wasn't enough, on some of the figures, you could see they had pubic hair.

The audacity!

The paintings were rejected by the university.

Klimt was not happy about this reaction to his work,

and he had many supporters and like-minded artists and thinkers on his side.

This rejection by the University of Vienna revealed a fissure that had grown for decades

between the traditional academy and the avant-garde.

Klimt decided to lead a group of his fellow radicals to break away from the art establishment,

creating the movement called the Vienna Secession.

Much like their bohemian counterparts in France and Belgium,

these Viennese rebels were ready to break away from traditional ideas

and the oppressive, conservative culture of the ruling class.

Life was modernizing in Austria at the same breakneck pace we see across Europe.

One of the first works he creates for the new group is a portrait of Athena,

who was chosen as the mascot for the Vienna Secession.

And we really start to see the hallmarks of Klimt's iconic style.

Firstly, gold dominates the picture, and he'll use gold leaf in a lot of his most famous works.

Remember, his dad was a goldsmith, and Gustav grew up with gold, fascinated by its sheen and sparkle.

He seemed to have an intuitive understanding of its properties.

Another of his brothers, George, had become a craftsman and metal chaser,

and he now did a lot of metal work for the secessionists.

He made the beautiful custom frame for this picture.

Athena was probably the perfect subject for Klimt, a goddess and a muse,

to represent this powerful new movement.

On her breastplate, you see Medusa poking its tongue out,

that's him giving the middle finger to the art establishment.

Yet, she's still an alluring femme fatale,

and he can't resist painting in a more sexualized female figurine to stand in her hands.

Pretty soon, Klimt is going all out with his gold,

like he does in the portrait of the biblical character of Judith.

Now, gold leaf isn't something you can really modulate to create dimensionality

through highlight and shadow, and you can't tone it down easily.

It tends to dominate wherever it is.

But he embraces its boldness and flatness and frames his subject in copious amounts of gold leaf.

He uses its flatness to accentuate the volume in the face.

She looks much more real and three-dimensional to me, juxtaposed against the gold.

And the contrasting brightness ends up highlighting both.

Our attention is drawn to the face and body precisely because it isn't in gold.

Up close, the skin tones he creates are a fascinating layer of contrasting colors,

harmonizing to an almost photographic realism.

The face and the expression is one of wistful pleasure, comfort, and ease.

The subject is also a classic one of the strong and beautiful Judith,

an alluring Hebrew widow and biblical character who famously seduces the Assyrian general,

Holofernes, who is waging war against the Jewish people.

She gets him drunk and decapitates him, ending the war.

Tucked down at the bottom of the painting, you can see the head in Judith's hands there.

Taking inspiration from long, tall, closely cropped Japanese prints,

Gustav began to experiment with increasingly vertical compositions.

He got more edgy, more sexual, and more playful, and nearly always heightened with gold.

But it doesn't always dominate the composition.

Here's a portrait he does around the same time of his other great muse, Emily Floog.

She was a successful fashion designer and self-made woman, and was herself part of a movement to

reform women's fashion so that it actually felt comfortable and wouldn't strangle you.

She made a line of loose-fitting, flowing pattern dresses that let you move your body

and look stylish at the same time.

Klimt's striking portrait focuses on the dress, emphasizing Emily's talent,

while experimenting with his growing love for geometric patterns and flecks of shining metallic colors.

It's possible that Emily and Gustav were lovers for a time,

but the evidence suggests their lifelong friendship was largely platonic.

The secession was not a casual club. They took their work very seriously,

and they dedicated a whole new building in Vienna as a headquarters for their ideas,

overshadowing artists in Paris, even Les Nabis, with gravitas and a public presence.

For their big exhibition in 1902, the secessionists decided to honor the 75th

anniversary of Beethoven's death, and so all sorts of works were submitted in honor of the composer.

Artists were asked to illustrate certain themes and emotions they got from Beethoven's music.

Gustav stepped up to the challenge and produced a series of murals for the exhibition,

now called The Beethoven Freeze. And this is where he really stepped out and let his freak flag fly.

Here we see Klimt's tell-tale tall vertical women compressed together with abstract geometric shapes and

patterns. This painting has so much going on, featuring three stylishly nude women on the left,

broken by a bold geometric pattern, being lured over by a much scarier woman and a handful of scary and

ghostly faces. Speaking of ghostly faces, one woman's foot is tied by a green rope to a very cute stone

with a ghost face on it. Our centerpiece figures what appears to be two women emerging from a gold and

black patterned portal, just behind another figure with a large belly and breasts. And don't forget,

we've got one more dead or ghostly figure off to the right. You may be asking now, what about the elephant,

or rather giant ape, in the room? Who is this Bigfoot-looking fellow, taking up all the space?

He is Typhoas, a hybrid monster, son of Gaia and Tartarus, who was eventually cast into the netherworld

by Zeus. His long beard is done with large vertical strokes, and he has a few missing teeth and surprised

stoned eyes. And does that giant blue wing that spans the top of the canvas belong to the great ape as

well? Yes, it does. Behind Typhoas' arm, we see a massive snake, which is emerging or morphing from the

ape's body. We only see the pattern of the snake, and that snake seems to multiply the further we travel

to the right into a dozen different patterns and colors. Klimt was working from Wagner's interpretation

of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The three women on Just to the Right are said to represent lasciviousness,

wantonness, intemperance, while the scary figures represent sickness, madness, and death. In man's search

for happiness, he must confront these dangers. Unpopular opinion here, but I kind of wish Klimt

had just stuck with backgrounds of giant beasts rather than the gold patterns he got into, but I'll

let you be the judge. Before we get onto his best-known works, I want to look at some lesser-known

paintings by Klimt, specifically the way he painted the natural world as he was honing his abstract

style. While this pear tree is indeed composed of thousands of dots, it's not pointillism. The

colors aren't there to blend. The colors are what the colors are. He's portraying each leaf with a dot

rather than creating a green leaf out of smaller blue and yellow dots. And he's painting every single

one of these 20,000 leaves. What is even crazier is under the tree, we see more trees in the distance

with thousands of more smaller dots. The tree trunks are not painted using pointillism either. They have

long brown scraping gestures and patchy, knotty brown spots. In this garden scene, we can see a

little bit more of his signature composition. If we imagine the sunflower section is one figure,

and the red flower section is another figure, and squint a little, it looks kind of like two lovers

embracing. And in Mohnfeld, we see another beautiful onslaught of small brushwork that gradually recedes

into smaller and smaller dots, until that last hedge on the horizon, which is just a veritable wall of

texture propped up against the marshmallowy gray sky that we get just a sliver of, broken up by geometric

tree shapes. As amazing as his paintings have been up to this point, there's a good reason he became a

worldwide sensation for what comes next. There seemed to be a part of his creative psyche from his arts and

crafts training that had been hibernating all these years. As Klimt's reputation grows, and he's living more

comfortably, he's able to experiment more in his portraits of the nouveau riche. This was a perfect pair,

because these newly wealthy women who had come up through new industries in banking and corporate law,

they were not accepted by the old money guard either. So, these society women were excited to have their

portraits painted by such a bold, innovative artist—clearly not a classical, traditional portrait—these

were portraits that proclaimed their new modern lifestyle from their new modern wealth. Another appealing

aspect for his models is that despite how strange and abstract many parts were painted, the women's faces

were always handled with the utmost delicate care. And we can see that in this portrait of Fritza Riedler,

her head flanked by a fascinating geometry of black and white muted tones. Taking inspiration from

Egyptian art to Diego Velazquez, Klimt came up with many unexpected combinations. The three-dimensionality

and softness of her face is contrasted with such intense patterning that it becomes extremely striking.

All this, framed by a very large block of muted, textured orange, contrast within contrast within

contrast. It all leads you back to the face. My favorite part of this painting is actually in the

chair. This is very subtle, but the way the pattern abruptly stops at an edge or a fold and immediately

picks up again creates a fascinating little moment—a moment that is in stark contrast to the very soft,

loose, and lacy folds of her long, flowing dress. This creates a collage-like feel to the painting,

especially where the dress meets the orange wall—a very sharp and bold transition. The silver bows on

her top also deserve a special mention for being expertly painted. As Klimt's success and confidence grow,

he doubles down on gold, using it in all kinds of unconventional ways. He starts laying a surface

of gold leaf down as the base for some works, then paints a thin, darker gold over it. Who paints over

gold leaf? Then he flicks tiny dots of gold paint all over that to make it really sparkle. It has a

richness and depth that goes beyond a single flat layer—something quite hard to achieve with the

metal. The height of the gold craze can be seen in the famous portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer. There's

only about 10% of this canvas where he has a little bit of Adele showing through in oil paint. Even her

body and dress contours are consumed by an avalanche of gold shapes. Klimt has built up his painting with

layers and layers of gold and silver leaf of various types, but he's added further texture,

building up shapes on top of the painting that he'll then overlay again with the gold leaf, creating the

illusion that actual metal reliefs have been added to the painting. The reliefs push the gold leaf up in

certain parts to catch the highlights. So, when you have the right light, the whole painting looks almost

like a mosaic, shimmering and sparkling as you move. If this painting looks impressive as a photograph,

imagine seeing it glitter in real life, especially back in 1907. This must have been absolutely

breathtaking. The year after this portrait was finished, he premieres The Kiss, which has become

an icon of romance, reproduced on mugs, t-shirts, and lunch boxes all over the place. It's a striking image

with a beautiful combination of golds and yellows, colorful round and flower-like patterns over the woman,

strong, bold geometric patterns over the guy. I'm not sure how romantic it is, because if we look at it

from another perspective, she seems resistant to his advances. He's grabbing her quite aggressively.

She seems tense. Some historians have claimed that the picture is of Klimt and his friend, maybe lover,

Emily Floog, others of the Greek legend Orpheus and Eurydice, but there's no solid evidence either way.

Personally, I think that ambiguity may have been apropos for Klimt. He had a complicated history

with women, and scholars still debate how to understand his legacy here. On the one hand,

Klimt almost always portrayed women as strong and independent characters. His portraits frequently

deify women as goddesses, and his frank paintings of female sexuality tracked with the larger movement

towards female liberation in the early 20th century, no longer hiding female sexuality and praising meekness

like the Victorians did, even showing taboo subjects like pregnancy. On the other hand,

he never married and is rumored to have left behind 14 children, most of which he never acknowledged.

This is not a man who could commit to a relationship or take responsibility for his children and possibly

left many women in such a difficult position. Some of these women were likely the wealthy socialites

that modeled for him. Gustav was very private, though, and rarely revealed anything about this side of his life,

leaving much to rumor and speculation. Even his long-term relationship with Emily Floog is ambiguous.

Although it definitely was an intimate friendship that endured for over 20 years, it was also partly a business

relationship, as Klimt and Emily introduced their wealthy clients to each other to sell more portraits

and dresses. When Klimt died, he left half of his estate to Emily, rather than any of the children he fathered.

His fellow star of Vienna, Sigmund Freud, would have much to investigate in Klimt's psyche,

a man who both uplifts and supports women in his work and yet is obsessed with sex and too emotionally

stunted for a relationship. Not to mention the fact that Gustav lived with his mother Anna for most of his

life. And while we're talking about Freud, look at the overall shape the couple makes in the kiss.

Does the form not seem a bit phallic to you? Don't a lot of his paintings? Perhaps that's a stretch,

but Klimt really didn't speak much about himself or his paintings, leaving us to speculate on what he

was trying to say. I am convinced that I am not particularly interesting as a person. There is

nothing special about me, he said. Hmm, how convenient. A Freudian would have a lot to say

about some of these works. This painting, suggestively called Fulfillment, also looks rather phallic.

It's one of those things hard not to see once it's been pointed out to you. But it's still a

dramatically bold and beautiful painting with a wild combination of colors and patterns. And you can

see how Klimt is going down the path of abstraction. By now, Europe is moving beyond post-impressionism

and into a new era of cubism, fauvism, and expressionism. And Klimt reflects all these changes

in his own work. Through patterning, he was gradually getting more rigid and hard-edged in his paintings.

Almost everything was painted very clean and flat. After this, though, he seems to swing back the

other way and bring much more looseness, freedom, and spontaneity and variety to his brushstrokes.

It's almost like he saw the future and decided on a different path via his post-impressionist roots.

In this portrait of Eugenia Primavese, we see the classic hallmarks of Klimt with a vertical woman in

pattern on a gold background. He's still pushing figures and patterns into tight spaces, but he's

moving away from the phallic rigidity of previous years. His overall compositions start to become much

looser, ditching sharp geometric abstraction with softer, rounder, and curvilinear lines and patterns.

The colorful patterns begin to take up more and more canvas space. These paintings were also much

more rounded and open, more flower-like. Perhaps he considered these a counterpoint to his phalluses.

In Virgin, these all-female swirling colorful layers of joy and pleasure emerge from the void as a

celebratory bouquet, opening up revealing further layers of color and pattern. In this striking and

enigmatic painting called Death and Life, we have a swirling mass of protagonists, men, women,

and children. Of course, wrapped up in quilts and blankets of all types of patterns. They're facing

up against who appears to be Death or perhaps the devil himself. He's a skull-headed figure grasping

some sort of wand or talisman, and he's cloaked in a garment composed of purple and blue crosses.

It looks like a middle schooler's notebook who just discovered heavy metal.

I'm fascinated by this cradle painting he made. Even as his style got looser, he still maintained a

beautiful contrast with areas of intense detail against large swaths of space. That detail and

concentration I find so engaging in his work, and it's especially fascinating as it accumulates into a

mountain or hill of swirling garments and fabrics. Perhaps someone is behind on laundry day.

But on top of this mountain is a sweet little ghostly baby head with bright pink lips,

which alters my whole perspective, and rather than look at this as a mountain, I'm suddenly

reoriented to be at the end of this cradle looking down at the baby in foreshortened perspective.

It's a bizarre and fascinating composition. I appreciate the surprise switch in perspective.

It's an incredibly loose painting, especially for Klimt. There are large gaps between strokes. We can see the

raw canvas and the underdrawing in places. Very little attention is given to attenuate the background.

In 1918, the flu pandemic was raging and Klimt was not spared. Weakened by the flu, he eventually died

from a stroke and pneumonia. He left this painting unfinished when he died. Although it's not hard

to fill in the remaining gaps, it appears to be about 90 percent finished. It's called The Bride.

Never having married himself, this can't help but make you wonder if he was getting ready to settle

down before sickness prematurely ended his life and career. However, a suite of 25 erotic drawings were

released the very next year. It was not some hastily put together compilation, but a collection

that Klimt was focused on before his death. And they were his most erotic and graphic yet. So,

even at the end, he left us guessing. It's incredible how his life ended up as an ideal patient study for

his neighbor, Sigmund Freud. And a fascinating subtext of a painter whose works continue to be greatly admired

and mass-produced and mass-produced around the world.