Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) was an Austrian Symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Art Nouveau movement. His major works include paintings, murals, sketches, and other art objects. Klimt's primary subject was the female body, and his works are marked by a frank eroticism. In 1876, Klimt was enrolled in the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, where he studied until 1883, and received training as an architectural painter. He began his professional career painting interior murals and ceilings in large public buildings.
Klimt's work is distinguished by the elegant gold or coloured decoration, often of a phallic shape that conceals the more erotic positions of the drawings upon which many of his paintings are based. Klimt travelled little, but trips to Venice and Ravenna, both famous for their beautiful mosaics, most likely inspired his gold technique and his Byzantine imagery.
Though publically known from the outset of his career for his allegorical compositions and female portraits, in the 1890s and afterwards landscape painting became an increasingly important outlet for Klimt’s creativity eventually accounting for nearly a quarter of his œuvre. The development of his landscape style mirrored and motivated the technical changes found in his figure paintings, initially employing both Impressionist and Pointillist techniques, and latterly engaging in more expressive brushwork and colour.
At the turn of the century he painted en plein air like his Impressionist contemporaries in France which endowed his early work with a level of naturalistic fidelity. However, Klimt, unlike the Impressionists, was not fascinated by a form of art which represented the perfection of naturalism, instead Klimt’s inner passion was for making his understanding more real, focusing on what constituted the essence of things behind their mere physical appearance. In the mid-1910s this changed and working primarily inside his studio he pioneered a decorative intensity and symbolism of his own devising, and which was to become his greatest contribution to the history of art.
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