Gustav Klimt - Painter of Women!

Gustav Klimt - Painter of Women

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) was born in Vienna as the second child of Ernst and Anna Klimt. At the age of 15, he entered the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule (1876-83). He was supposed to become a drawing teacher, but professor Ferdinand Laufberger recognized his talent. Klimt was influenced by Hans Makart and his teacher Julius Viktor Berger. In his early work from 1883 to 1892, Klimt was closely associated with his brother Ernst and with Franz Matsch. They created stage curtains, decorative wall and ceiling paintings, e.g. for the Burgtheater and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. In 1893, Klimt began to work on his own. In 1897, Klimt was a cofounder and the first president of the "Vereinigung bildender Künstler Österreichs - Secession". Before the turn of the century, Klimt began to develop his distinctive neo-impressionist style. In 1899, he began to spend his summer holidays at lake Attersee every year, where he painted his most important sceneries. Around 1900, with his ornamented portraits of women, Klimt created a new type of picture. Women occupied the central place in his art. His portraits range from historicizing, to allegoric, mythological, erotic and classic. As with Judith I (see photograph below), women became icons. In 1900, a conflict about his works created for the University of Vienna made him largely leave the stage of public life and seek private customers. In 1907, the young Egon Schiele visited him for the first time in his atelier. A year later, Klimt held his protecting hands over Oskar Kokoschka and the expressionists, as, for the first time, they showed their works in Vienna. Klimt's late work showed abstract and expressionist elements. He died on February 6, 1918, at the age of 56.

The exhibition "Klimt und die Frauen" (Klimt - Painter of Women) at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna is a huge success with over 120,000 visitors until today. The museum hosts the world's largest collection of Klimt paintings, but the last special exhibition of the painter's work at the Belvedere dates back to his 100th birthday in 1962. In the mid-1980s, at the exhibition "Dream and Reality" at the Wiener Künstlerhaus, Klimt's paintings were for the last time presented in a special exhibition to the public in Vienna. The permanent collection was of course always accessible and the Belvedere generously lent its Klimt's to important exhibitions around the world, such as in Zurich in 1992, in Tokyo in 1996 and in Milan in 1999. "Klimt und die Frauen" presents the first virtually complete overview of Klimt's female portraits.

At the center of the exhibition is the painter's probably most important and best-known work group, the portraits of women. It is complemented by allegoric paintings such Judith I and II, The Kiss or Water Snake. Among over 100 exhibited paintings and sketches are also works of European and American precursors and contemporaries of Gustav Klimt such as Ferdinand Hodler, Edouard Manet, Edvard Munch, James McNeill-Whistler and John Singer-Sargent. Last but not least, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna lent the portrait of the Infant Maria Teresa by Diego Velazquez to the Belvedere. Klimt used it as a model for his portrait of Fritza Riedler (the wife of a university professor in Berlin). In Vienna, Klimt is presented in his (art) historic context.

"Klimt und die Frauen" goes beyond a classical art exhibition and tries to give answers about the personal life and social status of the women Klimt portrayed. At the turn of the century with the "emergence of modernity", fundamental social change gave women a new position in society, culture and ideology. The exhibition also focuses on the influence of the haute bourgeoisie, the so-called "Ringenstrassengesellschaft", named after Vienna's most famous street, on art. Their patronage became vital to the art scene. The myth and ideal of Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) is another aspect of the exhibition. A symposium as well as a series of lectures accompany "Klimt und die Frauen". A publication on Vienna's collector's of the turn of the century should result from the symposium and constitute the exhibition's contribution to art history.

With the Portrait of Sonja Knips in 1898, Gustav Klimt managed to become the portraitist of the Jewish haute bourgeoisie in Vienna who, since the Jews had reached legal equality in 1867, had become a thriving force in commerce, finance, industry and art. Klimt's patrons were financiers, industrials and other members of the liberal (in the European sense) haute bourgeoisie. Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer (see Klimt's portrait of his wife below) was dominating the Austrian-Czech sugar industry. Karl Wittgenstein, another of his patrons, was often referred to as the "Austrian Krupp" and the creator of the steel cartel. August Lederer was the leading figure in the alcohol business in Central Europe. In the 1920s, he was considered "the richest man in Austria after Rothschild".
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The art of Degas

(b Paris, 19 July 1834; d Paris, 27 Sept 1917). French painter, draughtsman, printmaker, sculptor, pastellist, photographer and collector. He was a founder-member of the Impressionist group and the leader within it of the Realist tendency. He organized several of the group’s exhibitions, but after 1886 he showed his works very rarely and largely withdrew from the Parisian art world. As he was sufficiently wealthy, he was not constricted by the need to sell his work, and even his late pieces retain a vigour and a power to shock that is lacking in the contemporary productions of his Impressionist colleagues.
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Mary Cassatt - American Original!

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) lived in Europe for five years as a young girl. She was tutored privately in art in Philadelphia and attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1861-65, but she preferred learning on her own and in 1866 traveled to Europe to study. Her first major showing was at the Paris Salon of 1872; four more annual Salon exhibitions followed.
In 1874 Cassatt chose Paris as her permanent residence and established her studio there. She shared with the Impressionists an interest in experiment and in using bright colours inspired by the out-of-doors. Edgar Degas became her friend; his style and that of Gustave Courbet inspired her own. Degas was known to admire her drawing especially, and at his request she exhibited with the Impressionists in 1879 and joined them in shows in 1880, 1881, and 1886. Like Degas, Cassatt showed great mastery of drawing, and both artists preferred unposed asymmetrical compositions. Cassatt also was innovative and inventive in exploiting the medium of pastels.

Initially, Cassatt was a figure painter whose subjects were groups of women drinking tea or on outings with friends. After the great exhibition of Japanese prints held in Paris in 1890, she brought out her series of 10 coloured prints--e.g., Woman Bathing and The Coiffure--in which the influence of the Japanese masters Utamaro and Toyokuni is apparent. In these etchings, combining aquatint, dry point, and soft ground, she brought her printmaking technique to perfection. Her emphasis shifted from form to line and pattern. Soon after 1900 her eyesight began to fail, and by 1914 she had ceased working. The principal motif of her mature and perhaps most familiar period is mothers caring for small children, e.g., The Bath (La Toilette, c. 1892; Art Institute of Chicago).

Cassatt urged her wealthy American friends and relatives to buy Impressionist paintings, and in this way, more than through her own works, she exerted a lasting influence on American taste. She was largely responsible for selecting the works that make up the H.O. Havemeyer Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.
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Childe Hassam - Conneticut Impressionist !

While Childe Hassam's French connection was recognized so early in his career that any reference to Claude Monet became an annoyance to him, impressionism was but one of three strong currents flowing through his art. Two others surged up earlier: popular culture made familiar through Hassam's work as an illustrator; and lessons of early nineteenth century British landscape painting, reinforced by the artistic leanings of Boston during the 1860s and 1870s, and furthered by Hassam's travels to England in the 1880s.
Ernest Haskell, 1922
He has a way of taking his own where he finds it, and thus he leaves the stamp of his personality on localities where he has worked... The schooners beating in and out, the wharves, the sea, the sky, these belong to Hassam....
There are many other fields that he has invaded and made his. Flowers in gardens, flowers in still life, flowers as accessories to portraits. These are painted with great tenderness, great restraint of color yet very colorfully, always part of the picture, neverjumping out in forced contrast. interiors are his, interiors that are renderings of space with a magic play of light, the light that instinctively seems to be the heritage of Hassam.

Elizabeth Broun, 1994
In a series of paintings begun in 1907, Hassam showed a solitary woman standing by a window the individual placed in relation to the broader world. His women embody the finest of Western and Eastern traditions, evoked in this painting by the Hellenistic figurine and oriental screen. They are well bred, like the hybrid roses on the table. Hassam's generation was preoccupied by evolutionary theory, and to him, the modern American woman represented a refinement of nature and culture that had been long in the making.
The key to the picture, however, is found in the sliver of the "outside world" glimpsed through the window, where laborers are seen building a skyscraper. While these men are creating the visible edifices of the modern American age, the new American woman is coming to maturity as a guardian of civilization.
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