Gustav Klimt: Modernism in the Making

Gustav Klimt: Modernism in the Making is an excellent study of the artist's work that was published to accompany a 2001 exhibit at the National Gallery of Canada.  It contains not only examples of the artist's most important paintings and drawings, shown in two separate catalogues, but several essays that help place the artist in the context of fin de siècle Vienna when that city was home not only to the Secession but also to the music of Mahler and the psychoanalytic theories of Freud.

I have to admit that I have always resisted the idea of viewing Klimt as a modernist.  To me he has always represented the old guard that only gave way grudgingly to the expressionist art of Schiele and Kokoschka.  If Klimt was anything, he was a Symbolist and heavily influenced by other artists of that school, most notably Khnopff, Toorop, Stuck and Munch.  Symbolism looked back to the nineteenth century Romantic tradition, most especially in the emphasis it placed on decadence, and cannot help appearing somewhat old fashioned when compared to recent trends in early twentieth century art.  One must remember that at the same time Klimt was painting his romantic figurative works Braque and Picasso were experimenting with Cubism and Matisse with Fauvism.  In addition, Klimt's interest in the applied arts - he had spent seven years as as student at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule - placed him squarely within the Art Nouveau movement and imbued his work with a highly decorative character.  Nevertheless, the Vienna Secession did represent a conscious break by young artists dissatisfied with the staid academic traditions of the period, and it was a sincere attempt to move German art in a radical new direction.

There is no denying that Klimt was at least at first a prominent member of the Viennese art establishment.  Together with his brother Ernst and a student named Matsch, he formed the Künstlerkompanie through which the three received a contract from the Imperial Building Commission to complete various decorative projects within Vienna's public spaces.  It was only after the death of Ernst that Klimt began to work in a highly individualized style that eventually resulted in a scandal over a commission he had been awarded that involved the completion of several ceiling paintings at the University of Vienna.  The ideas he came up with - on the subjects of Medicine, Philosophy and Jurisprudence - were filled with pessimism and nude images that were totally out of character with the spirit of the project.  Even today, photographs of these works (the originals were destroyed by fire during World War II) can be shocking to the viewer.   After having returned the advance he had received for these works, Klimt went his own way and never again took a public commission.  But the experience had set him on a new direction that was to culminate in his design for the Beethoven Frieze in 1902.   Even so, Klimt remained a prominent society portraitist till the very end of his career and became quite wealthy depicting the likenesses of Vienna's elite. 

The paintings reproduced in the book offer an extensive overview of Klimt's career and allow the reader to follow his development as an artist from his earliest historical tableaux and mythical allegories to the final portraits he left uncompleted at the time of his death.  Included here are a number of landscapes in the pointillist style.  These are not nearly so well known as the artist's figure studies and show another side to his work and character.  Several key paintings are missing from the exhibit, however, and their absence limits the scope of this volume.  This is not so much a problem with the drawings, though, and from them the reader is able to gain a great deal of insight into Klimt's working methods.  The commentary offered by Marian Bisanz-Prakken in the essay that accompanies these graphic works is especially useful in demonstrating their place within the whole of the artist's oeuvre.