**This course will be taught In-Person**
In 1897 Gustav Klimt became the leader of the Viennese Secession, a group that provided exhibitions for young artists, brought the works of foreign artists to Vienna, and published its own magazine to showcase the work of members. The course will also focus on Klimt’s portraits, allegories, murals and landscapes, including those for which he is most well known such as The Beethoven Frieze, The Kiss and the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Klimt’s younger colleague, Egon Schiele, is noted for his expressive figural distortion in portraits and self-portraits.
Week 1: Vienna—a modern city for modern art
Vienna around 1900 was a metropolis of two million people at the cusp of momentous social, political, economic, scientific, and intellectual changes. Vienna provided fertile ground for the emergence of a group of exceptional artists, architects and designers who ushered in a period of almost unparalleled creativity in European artistic and intellectual endeavors. During the time of the modernist movement led by Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffmann, and Koloman Moser, key members of the Vienna Secession, a multidisciplinary environment emerged in which painting, music, writing, and intellectual thought flourished, bringing different arts together in a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art.
Week 2: Creating the Vienna Secession
Rebelling against conservative artistic institutions, Austrian artists, designers and architects formed the Vienna Secession with Klimt as its first president, spokesman and figurehead. Members looked to art from Western Europe, such as the French Impressionists and the English Pre-Raphaelites, as well the Byzantine Empire and Japan. This pioneering artists’ association brought international modern art to Vienna for exhibitions in their Secession Building, the first dedicated, permanent exhibition space for contemporary art of all types in the West. The group became known for their imaginative exhibitions, such as the Fourteenth Exhibition which featured Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze.
Week 3: Gustav Klimt—Early Works
Klimt began his professional career painting interior murals and ceilings in some of Vienna’s large public buildings. As one of the city’s leading history painters, Klimt’s early work shows a taste for classical antiquity – the era of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. His paintings are full of idealized nudes, sculptures and architectural elements. In his paintings and drawings, Klimt explored the great themes of life. He combined subjects such as love, death, suffering and the quest for happiness with a swirling, decorative style.
After the founding of the Vienna Secession, Klimt spent a decade exploring the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk and his approach evolved during this period to become more decorative and ornate, culminating in his “Golden Style.” Thereafter, he shifted to a more painterly manner of working in pure color and one influenced by French artists in particular.
Week 4: Klimt and Women
Klimt was dedicated to the theme of “women” throughout his life. He paid tribute to female beauty in his works like no other artist of his time and always placed feminine attractiveness at the center of his creative work. The clients for Klimt's large-format portraits of women were part of Vienna’s wealthy bourgeois class. His clients were willing to pay many times more than what other painters could demand for portraits for the great amount of effort and imagination he put into every portrait. Klimt created a completely new type of picture with his sumptuously ornamented portraits, many utilizing real gold leaf inspired by Byzantine mosaics.
Week 5: Klimt and Landscapes
For the last two decades of his career, Klimt devoted considerable energy to painting landscapes during his summer holidays on the Attersee in the Salzkammergut region of Austria, known for its tranquil lakes. Created purely for his own pleasure, these bucolic scenes became among his most sought-after pictures and were highly coveted by loyal patrons who assembled significant holdings of his major canvases.
Week 6: Egon Schiele
Klimt was a mentor to the painter and printmaker Egon Schiele and helped launch his career. Schiele embraced figural distortion in a bold defiance of the contemporary conventional norms of beauty. He was obsessed with self-discovery and, unlike Klimt who produced no self-portrait, Schiele is noted for his numerous self-portraits, as well as commissioned portraits of noted Viennese art patrons in his signature style. The Vienna Secession devoted its main exhibit space to his work March 1918, months before he died during the Spanish Flu epidemic at the age of 28.
