- Welcome to University Place Presents .
I'm Norman Gilliland.
It's very tempting and natural for us to categorize
things that we come across.
That's certainly true of the arts too and the way we look
at them and try to label them to understand them better.
But some of the arts and some of the artists really resist,
if not downright defy, categorization.
And one in that category is Gustav Klimt,
a fascinating figure from the early 20th century
and late 19th century.
And we'll see what kind of label, if any,
we can apply to him.
And our guide through the life
and works of Gustav Klimt is Barbara Buenger,
who is a professor of Art History at UW-Madison.
Welcome to University Place Presents .
- Thank you very much.
- How did you discover Gustav Klimt?
- Oh, that's funny
because...
I took a lot of Modern Art,
but Modern Art in the 60s
was really French art.
One day a professor pointed out a wonderful book
that was a more broadly-based look at the 19th century,
and there was work by Gustav Klimt.
And, in the jargon of
the 60s, I saw that and went, "Far out!" because he looked
sort of psychedelic.
And it happened the next year, unexpected,
I was in graduate school and working with Alessandra Comini,
a great expert on Klimt and Schiele in Vienna.
And she suggested I work on Klimt's "Beethoven Frieze."
So that's how I got involved with him.
But he seemed so different from
anything I knew of French art that it was quite a
step to take into him.
- Interesting that you should mention the college scene.
I was talking to a friend today and he said, "Oh, yes,
when I was in college, you know, it seemed like every other
dorm room had "The Kiss" poster.
- Yes, absolutely! (laughs)
- One of Klimt's most famous.
He does, if not have a psychedelic quality to him,
something it's a combination of
real and surreal
or real and exotic.
- All that design, all that gold, all that pattern.
In fact, from the start, it was very hard to place Klimt.
He was Austrian, and yet, even Austrians
were not sure how to place him.
He was someone who looked at
Austrian folk art,
but looked further east.
He went to Ravenna and saw the mosaics,
the Byzantine mosaics.
And it was a time when many people were moving away
from the treasuring of dominance of ancient Greece
and looking at Mid-Eastern art, Near-Eastern art
and starting to look at Oriental patterns from
Mycenea and other cultures.
And so it was a fascination with ornament and what ornament
could do and its expression power.
So he looked, and people didn't know,
if he was Austrian, what did he represent?
Austria, of course, as you know, was, the
Austro-Hungarian Empire was comprised of many
different nationalities, so one could not put a finger
on what it represented then.
- And Vienna, like much of Europe in those closing years of
the 19th century, early years of the 20th,
was just fermenting with all kinds of ideas that were
unconventional, considered 10 or 20 years earlier.
- Absolutely, it was really a hothouse of
ideas, of intellectuality.
Of course Freud was there.
Great ideas in psychology, in science,
in drama.
You had your leading plays that weren't being seen in any
capital, were being seen in Vienna.
And great ideas, of course, in always in music.
So Klimt had access
to many of these
directly and indirectly in artistic circles,
in salons, which were a great conveyor of ideas in arts
and literature, in the artistic groups to which he belonged.
And he made the transition, really,
from the 19th to the 20th century in the groups to which
he belonged, from a more conventional decorator,
as he began, of some of the buildings on the Ringstrasse at
the end of the century, to the forerunner and, really,
the president to the leading group called the Secession
that became the molder of the new ideas of the 20th century.
- So was he, by the time we get into the 1880s,
when he would have been in his mid-20s and into the 1890s,
is he actually doing public art?
- Yes, he trained in the...
School of Applied Arts where he
and his two brothers had their schooling.
It was very different from the academic training.
And first received commissions to train,
to paint, murals for institutions such as the
Art Historical Museum and the National Historical Museum
and all these great new buildings built in this boom period
of Vienna that when they took down the walls that
surrounded the Hofburg in Vienna and they built
all these different buildings in different historical
styles, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque,
and they needed these murals.
So he excelled.
He did them for the opera, for the theaters, and all these.
And he did these also historical styles,
imitating these styles.
In the Art History Museum, for instance,
he would do illustrations for ancient Greece or ancient
Egypt, and he would take the designs
from these styles and put them into the volutes
and other illustrations for these museums.
So he could have made a career
and continued to do this sort of historical illustration
for the rest of his life had he wanted to.
He had many commissions to do historical illustration.
He could have done, he did portraits as well.
But then he came in contact with the younger generation
and chose to do something very different.
- We have an image of one of the buildings
that he worked on here.
- Yes, that's the Art Historical Museum,
designed by Gottfried Semper.
It was a great example of
this revival of Renaissance style.
A most handsome example.
And we have these opposite the Natural History Museum
and these other institutions that line the Ringstrasse.
So Klimt is really identified with these.
And then inside this museum, he did these vignettes along
with other painters of this older generation that were
asked to make decorations for
this richly decorated interior.
- And how were those received?
I gather well, he continued to get commissions.
- Very well received, very well rewarded.
In fact, you have to realize they had, he had
to support them.
And also interestingly, even when when he joined the
Secession, they had the support of the government
and of the royal family for what they were doing.
So this was art that was very much supported,
very much loved.
These were the styles that were supported
then, and they had commissioned work for publications
and other types of works.
So this was certainly art that was well received.
- And theirs was kind of, I guess you'd say,
a re-interpretation of the classics,
ancient Greece, ancient Egypt.
- Yes, they put modern women with modern hairstyles or
sometimes they had the headgear of antiquity.
But they would maybe do nudes with modern articulation,
but they had the trappings of the...
Sort of, Pre-Tut era but the Egyptomania in those fashions,
and so that was quite...
Scintillating and attractive to people at that time.
- But did he ever go too far in terms of being explicit?
Was there any kind of popular reaction?
I mean we're still talking,
in a very general sense, Victorian terms.
- With those historicist works, yes.
It was probably chiefly as he became involved
with the Secession, this group that seceded from
the official Künstlerhaus
the official organization of the Academy,
and to show things.
He did, for instance,
a title page, a poster, to advertise the Secession and
when he showed nudity and bared genitalia
for "Theseus and the Minotaur" and a censor had to censor
that, this was going too far.
And several times this was seen as too much.
Klimt was of the generation, we really could relate to
the Symbolists or the Decadents
in France and throughout Europe, who were pressing
and showing types of nervous female types.
It was really in the fashion of the time in the sense of
neurosthenia or nervous appetites was really attractive
in this type.
But some people saw this as indeed too nervous.
Almost, the word "degenerate" would come to mind.
This was not fashionable.
So he could be criticized for that as well.
- Here's another building in Vienna.
- Well, this represents the next generation.
This is the Secession House by Josef Maria Olbrich.
And this was the new home of
the Viennese Secession.
And this, too, is in the classical style,
but a modified classical style.
Simplified cubic with its golden dome.
And actually already it's sort of
the butt of jokes in Vienna.
They call this crown the golden cabbage head.
(laughing)
The gilded dome structure, but simplified.
It was not imitating the classical orders we saw in the
Art Historical Museum.
And this was also a change from the Art Nouveau that
was so popular in Paris and other countries.
It represented the Viennese equivalent
of the Art Nouveau,
or as it was called in Germany,
the Jugendstil, the youth style.
They called it the Secession Style also.
But they preferred something that was more geometric,
a bit more simplified, a bit more cube-ified.
Preferred sort of asymmetrical ornament and a bit more
simplified forms.
And so Josef Maria Olbrich was a leading formulator
of this style, in fact, we find a lot of commissions
to do work also in Darmstadt, Germany.
Another leading practitioner of this
style, this quite different architectural accent,
was Josef Hoffmann, who designed Klimt's studio.
We have a picture of Klimt's own studio, designed by
Hoffmann, and you see it with its simplified woodwork,
geometric patterning, and layout of the forms
with its emphasis on rectangles and squares.
Notice, too, you see Japanese prints and
you can see some of the ceramics
or maybe you can't see them in this thing
in the shelves beyond,
this taste for Japanese art was strong
and a great influence in Vienna.
In fact, there was a lot of collecting of
Japanese art on the part of the people in Vienna.
A lot of Japanese art acquired by
the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna.
A lot of Japanese people in turn came to Vienna
and bought Viennese art.
So it was two-sided, it wasn't one-sided.
But this taste for Japanese art
had a profound effect on the aesthetic of Viennese art
toward simplification, the spare aesthetic.
And this would have wide...
...spread implications
for all the art that we see built by
the artists, produced by the artist in this group.
- Did they get into textiles too?
The Japanese are rich in that.
- Now they formed, they had their group, the Secession,
but they joined with craftspeople
and the Vienna workshops in every different craft,
so they worked in textiles.
They worked in ceramics, they worked in metals.
And many of these artists, like Hoffmann the architect,
he also worked in jewelry and in metals.
Many of them had their hands in all these different areas.
So they believed in this idea, propounded first of
all by the composer Richard Wagner, of the total work of
art, the Gesamtkunstwerk.
And so they wanted to combine the arts and crafts.
This is actually the leading idea in the arts mainly
throughout Europe at the turn of the century.
So this is something they took
and brought into principle in their exhibitions
and what they did.
Now we're seeing a photo
also of...
Klimt's good friend
and often partner.
We're not quite sure if she was his lover.
Emilie Flöge, who was a dressmaker and had,
with her sisters, a dress shop.
And this is a photo taken by Klimt.
So, he worked in the photography as well as in painting.
And he designed this dress, and she produced it.
And it's wonderfully loose-hanging for the day.
In fact, it's a model of the "reformed" clothes.
This was a new idea
in dress and design,
to be corset-free and
to be more modern.
The idea of "reformed" clothes
came from Henry van de Velde, the great Belgian architect
who was living then in Germany and came to the Vienna
Secession and talked about reformed clothes.
And had a great influence on Klimt and modern dress
throughout Europe,
and so this is an example of
high design, high style, wonderful fabric, elegant fabric.
And these fabrics that they designed in Vienna
were popular throughout Europe.
We have, for instance, the French designer
Paul Poiret would acquire fabrics designed
by the Weiner Werkstätte for his fashions
designed in Paris.
And Klimt did a portraits of Emilie Flöge.
There is a wonderful one of her in a blue dress.
And you see how pattern takes over.
This is a great change from what he was doing in
his earlier work in the Museum.
This is about 1902.
Again, there is design all over her.
We can compare it to some of his ancient Egyptian works
where he has ornament all over the figure.
It's still ornament, but it's now more like the ornament of
living cells and living creatures that he sees.
And he has her just a little bit of flesh,
and he has the figure emerge from this quite natural
and this again free-flowing silk dress, as he shows her.
And the asymmetrical alignment of the figure within the
ground is also something that he and others take over from
Japanese art.
- And we find in Klimt that I don't think we,
find in many other artists
of his time and place, this emphasis on gold.
I don't mean just the color, but I mean the texture of gold.
- Yes, gold, gold, gold.
And we come actually to another work,
perhaps his most famous work now in the United States,
if not everywhere, is the so-called "Woman in Gold",
the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer,
representative of his gold period around 1907.
In fact, his father worked in gold.
And both of his brothers were trained,
one as a goldsmith in particular, and taught him to
do gold work too.
So that when he developed his paintings,
he worked on them not just in paint but he would often
embellish them with semi-precious metals and with
embossing in gold work too.
So they had rich textures.
And he would use gold leaf but also incising
with metal and with design.
And so this rich work and this is one of these women.
And this woman, Adele Bloch-Bauer,
as well as his, Emilie Flöge,
was quite an intelligent, gifted, liberated
woman in her day.
And this is another, perhaps seeming, contradiction.
We are used to seeing Klimt often do the femme fatales,
again, as you might say, the sort of degenerate women.
And people would often say he seems to do these wealthy,
spoiled women, but they were quite talented women.
She was a liberated woman of her time and quite talented,
very much
in her role as...
In her home.
But he did this portrait.
He honored her, she honored him.
And after his death in 1918, she had a whole room devoted
to his works.
But this work too shows the new aesthetic taste of the day.
Again, with this gold on gold on gold.
The gold leaf.
We know he had seen the mosaics in Ravenna at this time
and the Empress Thoedora.
But also, again, this trace, the influence of Japanese art
so much in the asymmetrical placement.
I've got some samples of ukiyo-e prints here that were
in Vienna that we know he knew.
But just for types.
The asymmetrical place of the figure,
the type of piling of different pattern on patterns.
In Klimt's place it's a combination of organic and
geometric patterns and cells that seem to
open and suggest erotic growth and swelling and spines.
We have just a little bit of the figure.
In fact, her name is Bloch-Bauer.
And critics at the time someone complained it's more blech
than Bloch. (laughing)
It's more tin, it's more metal than it is Bloch.
We have also this wonderful sort of floating of patterns
into one another that's also of some Japanese
prints as well.
So many of these things he got were suggested by the
different prints that he admired in Japanese art.
There's also a handsome frame around this painting,
by the way, which was designed by Josef Hoffmann,
the architect, too.
This is the famous painting that
was just acquired by the Neue Galerie
in New York.
This is the one that had been seized by the Nazis
from her husband,
Friedrich Bloch-Bauer, when they came into
Austria, and it was taken from him.
He left Austria after the Nazis came and was in Switzerland.
It was wrongly seized from him,
and then it remained in Austria, remained in the Belvedere.
They falsely claimed that since she'd said in
her will that it belonged in the Belvedere,
it should remain there.
But she had merely said she wanted after he was done with
it that it should go to that gallery, but she had
never foreseen what the Nazis were going to do.
It still belonged to him.
He, of course, did not foresee the future either,
and it was taken from him when he was in exile.
So only after protracted proceedings in this case with
the help of Arnold Schoenberg's grandson
did they have this case, this amazing case that
finally got the works returned to her niece.
And then she sold this to Ronald Lauder,
and it came to the Neue Galerie in New York.
- Just to jump ahead for a minute, then.
After his death in 1918, Klimt's paintings
became increasingly appreciated and valued.
And that was true in the Germany of 1930s and 40s also?
Was it appreciated?
Not considered decadent or degenerate?
- Actually, it's quite interesting.
It was modern art and...
It was the value of these works was recognized.
So actually it was a Nazi guard
who saw this work in Vienna
and he, acquired it for the museum,
or he took it for the museum right then and there.
He knew it was valuable.
Hitler and Goering would not want this work,
would not want Klimts for their
collection just because they did not like modern art.
But on the other hand,
they did not try to sell it.
They tried to sell some modern art, of course,
to get the money from it, but by the point they went into
Austria, those efforts had failed.
And so they let it go.
They, again, other Nazis who would want this would have it.
So it did have value, and it was recognized to have
value, so they left it alone.
- Was it appreciated in Italy, Klimt's work?
- Yes, it was, actually, I've got a photo.
Actually, you just saw it on the slides right now.
It was.
Ironically, it was not appreciated in France at all.
There was a show in Paris in 1900.
They first saw Klimt and they had no understanding for
his works at all, could not appreciate it.
In Italy it was shown and appreciated.
And I've got a photo of 1910 exhibition at
the Venice Biennale.
And they liked it.
I think part of it because
there were so many recollections of the Ravenna Mosaics
and this taste for things East and the exotic look of it
that appealed to them.
And also this clean style.
Part of it was that Venice, and Italy itself,
northern Italy, had a strong taste for this
Art Nouveau, this Jugendstil, this new style.
They were very much into it, they liked it.
They liked the clean look of this exhibition.
They had some artists, Galileo Chini, for instance,
who was a great emulator of Klimt.
This did not last long,
but there were a great many fans for Klimt's style at that
time and the Rome exhibition right afterwards.
- You mentioned Wagner and earlier you mentioned
a Beethoven?
- [Barbara] Frieze, yeah. - [Norman] Frieze, yes.
- [Barbara] Well, this is central, as I said,
as a part of my first involvement with him.
And, in fact, I'm now going to talk about
this Beethoven frieze, 1902.
This is when the members of the Secession came together to
celebrate Beethoven and, above all,
a great sculpture of
Beethoven made by the German artist Max Klinger, who is a
great artistic figure, sort of a great German Victorian
figure who did works on great themes of human
life and yearning.
A great sort of German Symbolist.
And he'd done a great sculpture of Beethoven,
Beethoven heroically nude like a great Zeus with an eagle
cowering before him. (Norman chuckling)
And so the members of the Vienna Secession, a great photo
of them sort of lounging about in
their Secession Hall with Gustav Klimt seated on the throne
and other members, had decided to do an exhibition as a
total work of art to honor
this statue by Max Klinger
and the idea of Beethoven.
The idea of Beethoven and above all the Ninth Symphony
which has this choral symphony at the end and bringing
together the word and music, this idea of bringing
human aspiration to music and making it concrete.
So it was a great inspiration of bringing together
different types of art into a work of art.
They joined together in this exhibition in their hall.
This new hall made by Olbrich had movable walls that
they could change and make an exhibition as they wanted.
Quite a modern idea.
They had the ideal installation art, really.
And they put the Klinger statue in the center of this hall.
And they wanted you to be able to circulate
around this exhibition, but you could see
the statue from wherever you were in this exhibition.
And they agreed that they would embed their
works within the stucco.
They would avoid strong illusionistic effects.
They would just use monograms to identify themselves.
They would use only natural materials.
All in the interest of circulating around this
Beethoven by Klinger.
Klimt was the only one who was given
a whole room to himself.
You can see his figures on the wall above the Beethoven.
He was given three walls to decorate with his
Beethoven frieze, so on the top part of the architecture
where a frieze belongs.
And he gets this idea of a hero leading mankind,
suffering mankind, naked mankind, shown very nude.
And he is shown heroic in his armor,
leading them before
this pod filled with angels,
as these women float
in the background, against the hostile forces,
sort of the Typhoeus, and all these awful figures of...
Excess and worry
and the Gorgons.
And he's going to lead them against these horrible forces
in us and in nature to the higher things
that we can attain ourselves
and through the arts.
And so finally he did this in temporary materials
and casein colors.
And all the other artists did these other vignettes on human
themes to accompany this.
And so finally one scene I can show you is of Music.
In Music, you see these floating maidens behind coming
to the figure of Music, who is giving them release
and finding themselves in the arts and music.
And she is modeled on a figure in Greek art.
And this whole sort of style idea in this frieze has
found some stimulus going back into the works
of McIntosh, the Scottish Arts and Crafts
artist and his idea of the frieze.
He was very popular in fact in Vienna
and showed there often.
And this also type of architecture and style idea
of rectilineated forms,
spare forms, very much in accord with what Hoffmann
and the artists of the Secession were doing,
and having a frieze as well, seems to have been the
stimulus to Klimt's own frieze.
But finally, after the figure of Music we come
to a reconciliation of the lovers.
They're making love, they're embracing before a choir of
angels suspended in the air, and then
another line of women fall.
They're making love.
And this celebrates women as active lovemaking,
joining men,
being in accord with many philosophies
of life and love at the turn-of-the-century.
This is another thing that separates Klimt from the 19th
century and from what he did before and from these ideas,
that women could be active and powerful, and, again,
underlines this accord with many feminist philosophies
of the idea.
So they embrace in this pod which celebrates
their lovemaking and this germinating of life.
Throughout his art you see a lot of germinating pods
and things coming up from earlier longings.
We know that he and other artists in the Secession were
very much interested natural history
and the interpretation
of evolution
and of things
coming to life by the study of natural science.
We know that one of his champions, Berta Zuckerkandl,
was married to a leading anatomist at Vienna University
and that he came and lectured to them on natural science and
brought slides of microscopic enlargements of slides.
These artists studied these with fascination
and brought these to inform their ornaments.
So not only were they studying the ornament of Byzantine
art and different cultures, but they're also studying
natural ornamentation.
So we've got an image of his goldfish, for instance,
which shows also celebrating lesbian love, really,
these women hovering and sort of merging
so that they seem to be one unit brought together
and merged into one head and floating amidst
all these fish
and all these organic...
Plants and things growing about
in this wonderful floating world of lower beings.
The celebration of love is recalling this...
Growth of other realms and this wonderful
floating-free universe.
And we know that this is very much inspired
by his looking at
other forms of life.
A very popular source aside from these slides and lectures
we know were illustrations and readings.
We know he had lots of illustrated history
of nature, of animals,
copiously illustrated volume in his library.
Ernst Haeckel, a German proponent of Darwin in
Germany, published these beautifully illustrated volumes
too, of radiolarians, and made models that were in fact
featured at the Vienna Museum of Natural
History that showed these creatures from under the sea.
And these inspired many artists at the turn of the century
and artists of the Jugendstil to make these robustly alive
and burgeoning forms of life far out of proportion to the
way they really looked in nature.
So this was a new form of ornamentation in life that he
could make that was quite suggestive.
- And did Klimt ever do
a self-portrait?
- Actually, funny you should ask.
No, except one it was a drawing,
a caricature of himself
as a bit of genitalia sprouting a head.
(laughs)
So he was a--
- Unconventional in the self-portrait department.
- Yeah, a celebrator of the sexual life, you could say.
And I have another, this is
one great commission he did,
the mural commission.
Another one, whose works I really can't show you on TV,
was a set of murals for the University of Vienna,
for the "halle" of the university, which he worked
on starting before the Beethoven frieze and slightly after.
These were controversial, the set of four murals to join a
larger one that was to show the victory of light over
darkness another artist had done, someone with whom
he had decorated the Vienna Museum.
And he was caricatured I think I can show you the
caricature of him working the scaffolding on his Philosophy.
It has two nude models giving him food, you know,
grapes and nectar and ambrosia as he's showing this
abstruse subject.
And people found these too abstruse.
They didn't understand them.
They seemed pessimistic.
They couldn't understand them because murals of this sort
for a university were supposed to be enlightening.
They were supposed to show books--
- [Norman] Or inspiring.
- Telescopes.
They're supposed to show God up above.
They were supposed to show,
light coming from heaven.
And these were dark, they were gloomy. (Norman laughs)
They showed Philosophy as this mass, ineffable mass.
They showed chains of human beings,
sort of this writhe,
sort of the survival of the fittest,
one could say.
- [Norman] Back to Darwin. - These chains of birth
- [Barbara] and death and suffering.
And even his champions would say, "Well at least if he's
"showing medicine, at least he could show
"the healing powers of medicine." (laughs)
Everything looks sort of mysterious, and people couldn't
quite tell what he was suggesting.
But he had strong defenders, but they
found these
too ambiguous, and that was
typical of Symbolism,
that is to make people think and to show these
mysteries that maybe things weren't clear-cut in
the modern world. - [Norman] More than one
possibility to interpret. - [Barbara] Yeah.
- So what happened with Klimt when he paints a mural for
the University and they say we don't like it?
- Well, this was criticized in Parliament.
It was criticized by some of the people,
some of the professors at the University.
He'd been paid for it, and he finally got fed up with it
and he bought them back.
So he took them back.
And these were some of the works
that were destroyed in that fire that was apparently caused
by retreating Nazis in 1945
at the end of the war.
Now, one of the great champions of these murals was
a woman, this Berta Zuckerkandl, was a great journalist.
She was married to the anatomist who lectured the members
of the Vienna Secession.
A great feminist.
She held a salon in her house and she brought all the
great figures of science,
of psychology, of writing together.
She and her husband could not afford a portrait
by Klimt because he lived on his professor's salary.
I think her sister had her portrait painted by Klimt.
She was quite adamant in defending these
and other works by Klimt and particularly in defending
his way he depicted women.
He did a famous image of a pregnant woman
which I also can't show you on TV.
- [Norman] Not in its entirety anyway. (laughs)
- Not in its entirety anyway, called "Hope 1",
which shows a pregnant woman, her body misshapen.
And then again a sort of recapitulation of the Darwinian
idea of how maybe what growth
inside of us echoes
the growth from primal beings,
shows this sort of odd tadpole cum-skate in the background.
She is looking sort of entranced with the mystery inside
of herself, untroubled by the death in
the figures worrying behind her because she's intrigued
by the mystery within herself and this mystery
of life that's gone on.
And unashamed by this.
And so Berta Zuckerkandl praises this,
praises Klimt's conception as being honest, forthright,
and this is a way of showing women.
So, again, another example of how women,
really,
enlightened women of the time really saw this as
a strong figure on their side.
- You mentioned the architect Josef Hoffmann.
What sort of collaboration did he have,
did Klimt have with him?
- Well, they were partners all along.
And Hoffmann remained even well after Klimt's death
a leading figure of the Secession, even as
the Secession had great troubles just after World War I
and finally ended in the 30s.
He was a leading figure and great supporter of women
artists, I might add, in Secession.
And he continued to build even after the disintegration
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Hoffmann had a great, actually all these artists
in the Vienna Workshops,
had a great gift coming to them.
About 1907, 1908 when
a commission by Stoclet in Brussels.
His father had died and he asked them to design a palace
for them in Brussels, (coughing) a large private home.
And so Hoffmann did, and you can see an image of it.
It is broad, simplified
areas of marble, lined with brass.
(coughing) This huge form.
Spare no cost.
He had marble on the inside, rosewood veneer,
all the finest materials.
And the workmen of the Vienna Workshops executed the
interior, the furniture, and the murals
and the furniture of this.
Klimt did another mural installation.
He did not, in fact, go to Brussels,
but he designed a mural which was not
as ambitious in content as his Philosophy,
as his University murals,
or the Beethoven frieze,
and combined, again, the figures of "The Kiss"
and "The Tree of Life."
Rich in its overlay of patterns and designs,
again we can see many echoes of
Japanese art in his "Tree of Life."
Mycenaean art in his spirals and rich overlay of
mosaics with golden spirals and semi-precious stones,
and of landscape with
this pattern taking over.
We don't say he uses ornament to decorate.
Ornament is a full bearer of meaning
in this or in "The Kiss."
Now, the ornament has bound the couple fully
in their embrace.
- [Norman] This is the famous "Kiss."
- Almost no body, yeah, one of the many (laughing).
But it's fully embodied in the approach
of the different types of these swelling
of forms as they come together.
What's interesting, though, again, we can trace these to
all this exotic Eastern source, but there is another
perhaps less expected source that an art
historian brought up a few years ago at an exhibition.
And this is a Romanesque source.
So from Eastern Austria, from Styria, this is a pattern
from a Romanesque door,
metalwork on a door
of a Styrian church
of the 14th-century.
So you can see how these things
occur in many different cultures.
It would be typical that he would find this closer to
home as well as in more exotic cultures.
So it's interesting that these
patterns come both from close and from far.
And it's interesting that this Vienna Workshop had
took its influences, it's ideas
from both many folk patterns of Vienna and arounds
and from more exotic course centers.
- Well, just as Klimt was a member, a founding member,
of the Secessionist Movement.
Were there reactions to the Secessionist movement
and to Klimt?
- Absolutely, and the...
Immediately following group,
the Expressionists, and their champions included
many critics and architects and intellectuals,
though they all admired Klimt and the Secessionists
and felt that they had paved important ground for them,
felt that they had a different way to go.
They became increasingly
impatient with all that pattern, all that decoration.
And Adolf Loos, a very important architect we've got a
portrait of him by Oskar Kokoschka, a great artist who was
an Expressionist and who does away with all that ornament,
even though he too had trained in the Arts and Crafts School
and originally worked with a lot of pattern and
ornament like the Secessionists.
You see he works with a much more loose, gestural,
painterly style in his portrait of Loos.
And Loos himself was quite sardonic in his criticism
in a book called "The Poor Little Rich Man" of 1900,
in which he criticized things like the Stoclet Palace
or things like that of the turn of the century.
And he said, "How horrible to have to live
"in a house like that."
Completely designed by the Vienna Secession.
And you couldn't get gifts from your grandchildren because,
you'd have your slippers designed by the Vienna Workshop,
but you couldn't get art by your grandchildren and
you couldn't get anything else because your architect would
always say, "No, you have to have things designed by me."
- Well, that does raise an interesting question, doesn't it?
A big question, and I mean I even think of,
Frank Lloyd Wright in this context.
That is it's one thing to design a structure that has a
universe all its own, but then as soon as
you inject people into it they will necessarily bring
something else that may be at odds with that universe you
have built. - [Barbara] Yes (laughs).
- [Barbara] You must keep with my aesthetic.
You must adhere to it.
And of course there was a lot of irony because there is a
lot of ambiguity even in, as I said, Kokoschka used a lot
of ornament, and Loos himself had done as well.
And another artist of this next generation, Egon Schiele,
was a great Expressionist, who, in fact,
came to Klimt and said "I want to study with you."
Klimt said there's nothing I can teach you're
so well-trained.
In fact, Scheile had trained at the Academy
and was a precocious draftsman.
But, again, this younger generation who had very
different needs and interests.
Also this younger generation
felt they couldn't get the support they needed,
and their advisers said "You have to go to Berlin,
"you have to go to Munich, you need galleries."
There wasn't a gallery system in Vienna.
- [Norman] Oh, really?
- Yeah, so they were screaming, they needed support
and they needed monetary support and they needed
the intellectual support they felt they could not get under
the old system in Vienna.
So there's a wonderful portrait in which Schiele
shows himself and Klimt in these gowns they both wore.
As hermits, they're both recluses.
It's almost a symbiosis, Schiele shows himself emerging
from Klimt, who seems to be falling back on the wayside.
Klimt also did a lot of landscapes.
40% of his works which might be less well known to us.
- [Norman] Yeah, they seem to be.
- Rich, lavish, here's one in the Museum of Modern Art.
There are one or two also in the Neue Galerie in New York.
He of course had a lot of patrons, but his patrons didn't
necessarily want his figurative works
on depressing subjects.
He liked painting them when he was under all this flak
for his controversial figurative works.
He himself liked to do landscapes.
He also had a special viewfinder.
He would peek through a device, you know,
so he would have a close sight on what he was seeing.
And so he would come close to his motifs.
In this, many of the trees would disappear,
so we seem to have a close-up of just these little dots.
You can see he's been looking at the Pointillists
and the little dots of someone like Signac
or Rysselberghe or Seurat, and just loving this animation
almost like the small cells that he magnifies.
And this wonderful magnification of light in these
small things.
Critics would say, "Oh, this is like a carpet.
"It is like decoration."
They would see it as degenerate.
It's not your basic trees, but this wonderful carpet effect
was quite deliberate on Klimt's part.
But if we go to the next generation,
if we see Egon Schiele, again, we see the new generation
having just very different interests even though they come
from Klimt.
So, Schiele when he shows Trees in 1912, we see--
- [Norman] A little streamlined, to say the least. (laughs)
- [Barbara] It's not quite as lush.
As Carl Schorske, the great historian of Vienna and
Viennese cultures said, "We've left the garden.
"We've left this paradise of the Vienna Secession."
And we have things more angular, again, more gestural as we
have in Kokoschka and we have the bare
trees and leaves
and things that become more anthropomorphic,
in their expression.
- [Norman] It's almost as if there's a prediction
of World War I there, that landscape, more barren landscape.
- He had something very different and something more
agonized or, you know, Christ-like or something like that.
And Schiele actually did this portrait of a woman wearing
the dress, also the Weiner Werkstätte,
the Vienna Workshops, the patterns, bright patterns,
folk patterns of their cloth.
And this is a young woman
who, like many of the models, many of his portrait
subjects, had a lot of money and bought the clothes
from this group.
But it looks odd and ambiguous in ways
that Klimt never looked odd.
We don't know those hand gestures,
those little fingers come together in this odd way,
and she doesn't even seem supported.
In fact, Schiele had her lie on the bed
so her pose is not explained.
She seems to hover, and he has her fully clothed,
as if she wants to distance himself from her.
She was a young women about his own age.
Now this is a case--
It's quite interesting because Klimt did a portrait
of the very same woman about four years later.
Klimt shows her in a very different way.
- [Norman] I would say! (laughs)
- Much more lush back in the garden, as it were.
She is again wearing clothes of the Weiner Werkstätte,
but actually she had a jacket from the Weiner Werkstätte,
a fur jacket, but she turned it inside-out
so the lining is there in its full pattern.
And then, he magnified the pattern on one of his Korean
vases, so we see all the figures but very large.
It's colorful, it's painterly, actually recalls
something like a Vincent van Gogh, or this
great Monet portrait of his wife with all sorts of color.
So it's much more luxurious.
It doesn't have that ambiguity of the Schiele.
He certainly knew that portrait, but it's much more.
This is buoyant color, celebration of life.
He certainly knew the Schiele
and he wanted to respond to it.
And he responded to it in his own way.
- As we go back through some of these paintings by, well,
Schiele and by Klimt, especially the figure that we just
saw that was Schiele.
Does perspective play any part in their paintings?
There seems to be over all a flatness to them.
- Yes, well, that's a good point.
Schiele is...
Quite concerted in
demonstrating a sort of
a modernist flatness and sort of...
Exaggerating that and taking away,
sort of vacuuming out that space.
His intervals are much more pronounced than those
intervals that we saw in Klimt,
that were taken from the Japanese.
He makes those stand out.
They're much more electrified, much more tense,
the way he has those come out
and lets that operate to a much more energized way
than we had in Klimt.
- Vienna, end of the 19th century,
beginning of the 20th century, you can't get around Freud.
Connection between Freud and Klimt?
- Absolutely, (Norman chuckles)
they were very much talked about, read about.
In the same circles,
in the same salons.
I don't think we can say that Klimt read all of Freud.
And actually Freud's views of women were in many ways
much more backwards than Klimt's.
- [Norman] Yes, I would say.
- And Freud's views on art were also quite,
he collected antiquities.
He had.
- He had a great appreciation for Renaissance art.
- Yeah, and he had, you know, all these little figurines
from much older cultures.
When he collected art it was actually more like,
you know, Klinger and older Symbolists.
It wasn't Klimt, you know.
We like to think that he would, of course,
by all these people who were contemporary,
but he of course had a great influence on this.
But these were ideas that were growing and steaming,
and had a great influence on everyone,
but they were manifested in different ways.
But they were certainly there at the same time.
- Kind of a legacy question, then.
Klimt dies in 1918
just before the end of World War I.
So much changed in many ways, but in the arts,
certainly in music, during and after World War I.
How did that whole change in the culture of Europe
affect the appreciation of Klimt?
Was there a connection, or was he just kind of gradually
more appreciated after his death?
- I think it took a long time.
I think within Vienna he was appreciated,
and then of course you have the big,
you have the dissolution of Austria-Hungary.
You have The Depression and war...
Again in this country, there's really no exhibition
of Klimt or Schiele 'til the 1960s.
Within Vienna, he's always been appreciated.
The appreciation of those what
would we say probably the music came first precisely
because some of the exponents came to this country
- [Norman] That's a good point.
- And made it known, and it was practiced
much more than before, and they had disciples,
whereas Klimt really didn't.
I should add that Egon Schiele himself died in 1918 of the flu.
And so some of that was quashed.
Kokoschka migrated
to London in Europe, so he had a following.
But this was such a rarefied, specifically Viennese,
taste that it really is, really--
- Can we see influence of Klimt in those to follow,
or is it really just a thing unto itself?
- Oh, it definitely followed in Vienna
and in the followers there.
I definitely see it in
contemporary artists of...
Vienna perhaps following Schiele more than Klimt,
but certainly a knowledge of them.
I think just looking at some recent catalogs of Klimt,
I think our own age's
sharper sense of eroticism
and sexuality has brought renewed, sharper insights
into Klimt and what the meaning of these works were,
and what was doing, and what was so shocking
and what, you know, in some ways still remains shocking
about these works--
- [Norman] (laughs) Clearly.
- And what they were doing at that time, and can be said.
It was really pushing the envelope in so many ways.
And I also teach
German and Austrian art
and there were parallel developments in Germany,
but they knew of each other and did not.
And I think, as you say, the war, World War I,
stomped things out and the other war We can never forget
how much those wars brought a stop to a lot of things.
- Barbara Buenger, thank you for taking us through
the life and times and art, some of it, of Gustav Klimt.
- Well, thanks for having me and listening.
(laughs)
- I'm Norman Gilliland and I hope you'll join me
next time around for University Place Presents .