古斯塔夫·克里姆特

生平

1918年，克里姆特因染上西班牙型流行性感冒引起中风与肺炎等而病故。

Gustav Klimt (14 July 1862 – 6 February 1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and a founding member of the Vienna Secession movement. His work helped define the Art Nouveau style in Europe. Klimt is known for his paintings, murals, sketches, and other objets d'art. Klimt's primary subject was the female body, and his works are marked by a frank eroticism. Amongst his figurative works, which include allegories and portraits, he painted landscapes. He is best known for The Kiss and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. Among the artists of the Vienna Secession, Klimt was the most influenced by Japanese art and its methods.

Early in his career, he was a successful painter of architectural decorations in a conventional manner. As he began to develop a more personal style, his work was the subject of controversy that culminated when the paintings he completed around 1900 for the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna were criticised as pornographic. He subsequently accepted no more public commissions, but achieved a new success with the paintings of his "golden phase", many of which include gold leaf. Klimt's work was an important influence on his younger peer Egon Schiele.

Klimt died in 1918, having suffered from a stroke and pneumonia. Since his death, Klimt's paintings have brought some of the highest prices recorded for individual works of art at auction.

Biography

Early life

Gustav Klimt was born in Baumgarten, near Vienna, in the Austrian Empire on 14 July 1862. He was the second of seven children: three boys and four girls. His mother, Anna Klimt (née Finster), had an unrealised ambition to be a musical performer. His father, Ernst Klimt the Elder, was a gold engraver from a peasant family in Bohemia. All three of their sons, including Klimt's younger brothers Ernst and Georg, displayed artistic talent early on. Klimt's siblings occasionally acted as models for his early works.

Klimt's father often struggled to find work, and Klimt lived in poverty while growing up.……

The "Company of Artists"

In 1877, Klimt's brother, Ernst, who would become an engraver like their father, also enrolled in the Kunstgewerbeschule.……

Folios

Gustav Klimt: Das Werk

Das Werk von Gustav Klimt (English: The Work of Gustav Klimt) was the only monographic publication of Klimt's work issued during his lifetime. The completed portfolio was published in 1918 by Viennese publisher Hugo Heller, a close friend of Klimt's, and is sometimes referred to as the "Heller Portfolio". It consisted of fifty collotype reproductions of Klimt's paintings.

The project originated in 1908 at Galerie Miethke, headed by Carl Moll, which served as Klimt's exclusive agent.……

Fünfundzwanzig Handzeichnungen – "Twenty-five Drawings"

Fünfundzwanzig Handzeichnungen ('Twenty-five Drawings') was released the year after Klimt's death.……

Selected works

Drawings

In 1963, the Albertina museum in Vienna began researching the drawings of Gustav Klimt. The research project Gustav Klimt. Die Zeichnungen, has since been associated with intensive exhibition and publication activities.

Between 1980 and 1984 Alice Strobl published the three-volume catalogue raisonné, which records and describes all drawings by Gustav Klimt known at the time in chronological order. An additional supplementary volume was published in 1989.……

Legacy

Artistic influence and reception

During his lifetime, Klimt influenced other artists, such as the Italian Liberty style artist Galileo Chini (1873–1956) and the Italian artist Vittorio Zecchin (1878–1947). Klimt was exhibited at the 1910 Venice Biennale, with his exhibition influencing the artistic environment within Venice. Within this context, Zecchin created in 1914 the decorative panel cycle Le Mille e una Notte ("One Thousand and One Nights") for the dining room of the Hotel Terminus in Venice. The cycle of twelve paintings, now dismembered, is considered one of the greatest Art Nouveau masterpieces in Venice. Six panels are held by the Ca' Pesaro art museum.……

Posthumous auction history

Klimt's paintings have brought some of the highest prices recorded for individual works of art.……