Gustav Klimt: Leben und Werk
Category: Books,Biographies & Memoirs,Arts & Literature
Gustav Klimt: Leben und Werk Details
Reviews
GUSTAV KLIMT - LIFE AND WORK provides a comprehensive introduction to the life of the Viennese artist, someone who spent his life, it seems, trying to challenge the art establishment by creating works that would be more in tune with the imagination. Hence he consciously turned away from 'realism' or 'romanticism' into a more figurative form that would express "joy" - understood in this context as the kind of emotions that could neither be controlled nor measured. A pioneer of a movement that would later be described as Modernist, Klimt was very much a product of his time - the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in which colonial (or dominant) values were being questioned and new artistic forms emerging in their place. He was much more interested in exploring feelings, however 'good' or 'bad' they might be, rather than painting naturalistically or realistically. Husslein-Arco's book is very good on aspects of Klimt's painting, with plenty of color illustrations to prove its point; but skirts over the fact that Klimt was also a serial womanizer, who treated most of his - much younger - female subjects shamefully, as objects to be portrayed in his paintings. He was very much a scopophilic painter, one who enjoyed the power of the male gaze. Nonetheless his work turned out to be highly influential in shaping the way twentieth century European art developed, and for this we must be grateful.