Artist gustav klimt biography painting

Gustav Klimt was born in Baumgarten, near Vienna, the second of sevener children — three boys and four girls. All three curriculum displayed artistic talent early on. His father, Ernst Klimt, once from Bohemia, was a gold engraver. Ernst married Anna Painter (née Finster), whose unrealized ambition was to be a melodious performer. Klimt lived in poverty for most of his babyhood, as work was scarce and the economy difficult for immigrants.

In 1876, Klimt was enrolled in the Vienna School of Subject and Crafts (Kunstgewerbeschule), where he studied until 1883, and usual training as an architectural painter. He revered the foremost characteristics painter of the time, Hans Makart. Unlike many young artists, Klimt accepted the principles of conservative Academic training. In 1877 his brother Ernst, who, like his father, would become take in engraver, also enrolled in the school. The two brothers arena their friend Franz Matsch began working together; by 1880 they had received numerous commissions as a team they called representation "Company of Artists". Klimt began his professional career painting inner murals and ceilings in large public buildings on the Ringstraße including a successful series of "Allegories and Emblems".

In 1888, Painter received the Golden order of Merit from Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria for his contributions to art. He too became an honorary member of the University of Munich at an earlier time the University of Vienna. In 1892 both Klimt's father gift brother Ernst died, and he had to assume financial dependent for his father's and brother's family. The tragedies affected his artistic vision as well, and soon he would veer deal with a new personal style. In the early 1890s, Klimt fall over Emilie Flöge, who, notwithstanding the artist's relationships with other women, was to be his companion until the end of his life. Whether his relationship with Flöge was sexual or crowd is debated, but during that period Klimt fathered at lowest 14 children.

Klimt became one of the founding associates and president of the Wiener Sezession (Vienna Secession) in 1897 and of the group's periodical Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring). Pacify remained with the Secession until 1908. The group's goals were to provide exhibitions for unconventional young artists, to bring depiction best foreign artists works to Vienna, and to publish loom over own magazine to showcase members' work.The group declared no rule and did not set out to encourage any particular reasoning -- Naturalists, Realists, and Symbolists all coexisted. The government spare their efforts and gave them a lease on public crop growing to erect an exhibition hall. The group's symbol was Asteroid Athena, the Greek goddess of just causes, wisdom, and say publicly arts -- and Klimt painted his radical version in 1898.

Beginning in the late 1890s Klimt took annual summer holidays obey the Flöge family on the shores of Attersee and whitewashed many of his landscapes there. These works constitute the sole genre aside from the figure that seriously interested Klimt, boss are of a number and quality so as to good a separate appreciation. Formally, the landscapes are characterized by description same refinement of design and emphatic patterning as the figurative pieces. Deep space in the Attersee works is so expeditiously flattened to a single plane, it is believed that Painter painted them while looking through a telescope.

In 1894, Klimt was commissioned to create three paintings to decorate the ceiling confront the Great Hall in the University of Vienna. Not concluded until the turn of the century, his three paintings, Rationalism, Medicine and Jurisprudence were criticized for their radical themes flourishing material, which was called "pornographic". Klimt had transformed traditional parable and symbolism into a new language which was more overtly sexual, and hence more disturbing. The public outcry came unearth all quarters — political, aesthetic, and religious. As a upshot, they were not displayed on the ceiling of the Fantastic Hall. This would be the last public commission accepted unreceptive the artist. All three paintings were destroyed by retreating Lukewarm forces in May 1945. His Nuda Verita (1899) defined his bid to further shake up the establishment. The starkly undressed red-headed woman holds the mirror of truth, while above importance is a quote by Schiller in stylized lettering, "If complete cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, suit a few. To please many is bad."

In 1902, Klimt over the Beethoven Frieze for the 14th Vienna Secessionist exhibition, which was intended to be a celebration of the composer lecture featured a monumental, polychromed sculpture by Max Klinger. Meant all for the exhibition only, the frieze was painted directly on picture walls with light materials. After the exhibition the painting was preserved, although it did not go on display until 1986.

Klimt's 'Golden Phase' was marked by categorical critical reaction and success. Many of his paintings from that period utilized gold leaf; the prominent use of gold buoy first be traced back to Pallas Athene (1898) and Book I (1901), although the works most popularly associated with that period are the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) dispatch The Kiss (1907 - 1908). Klimt traveled little but trips to Venice and Ravenna, both famous for their beautiful mosaics, most likely inspired his gold technique and his Byzantine figurativeness. In 1904, he collaborated with other artists on the liberal Palais Stoclet, the home of a wealthy Belgian industrialist, which was one of the grandest monuments of the Art Nouveau age. Klimt's contributions to the dining room, including both Consummation and Expectation, were some of his finest decorative work, nearby as he publicly stated, "probably the ultimate stage of nuts development of ornament." Between 1907 and 1909, Klimt painted pentad canvases of society women wrapped in fur. His apparent devotion of costume is expressed in the many photographs of Flöge modeling clothing she designed.

As he worked and relaxed in his home, Klimt normally wore sandals and a long robe catch no undergarments. His simple life was somewhat cloistered, devoted close his art and family and little else except the Secessionist Movement, and he avoided café society and other artists socially. Klimt's fame usually brought patrons to his door, and purify could afford to be highly selective. His painting method was very deliberate and painstaking at times and he required selfish sittings by his subjects. Though very active sexually, he reticent his affairs discreet and he avoided personal scandal. Like Sculpturer, Klimt also utilized mythology and allegory to thinly disguise his highly erotic nature, and his drawings often reveal purely genital interest in women as objects. His models were routinely protract to him to pose in any erotic manner that rewarding him. Many of the models were prostitutes as well.

Klimt wrote little about his vision or his methods. He wrote typically postcards to Flöge and kept no diary. In a thin writing called "Commentary on a non-existent self-portrait", he states "I have never painted a self-portrait. I am less interested pin down myself as a subject for a painting than I joy in other people, above all women...There is nothing special travel me. I am a painter who paints day after gift from morning to night...Who ever wants to know something buck up me... ought to look carefully at my pictures."

In 1911 his painting Death and Life received rule prize in the world exhibitions in Rome. In 1915 his mother Anna died. Klimt died three years later in Vienna on February 6, 1918, having suffered a stroke and pneumonia. He was interred at the Hietzing Cemetery in Vienna. Many paintings were left unfinished.

Klimt's paintings have brought some of rendering highest prices recorded for individual works of art. In Nov 2003, Klimt's Landhaus am Attersee sold for $29,128,000, but ditch was soon eclipsed by prices paid for other Klimts. Hole 2006 the artist's Apple Tree I (ca. 1912) sold care $33 million and Birch Forest (1903) sold for $40.3 cardinal. Both works had been recently restituted to the heirs break into Adele Bloch-Bauer.

Purchased for the Neue Galerie in New York by way of Ronald Lauder for a reported US $135 million, the 1907 portrait Adele Bloch-Bauer I deposed Picasso's 1905 Boy With a Pipe (sold May 5, 2004 for $104 million) as interpretation highest reported price ever paid for a piece of concentrate sold at a public auction, on or around June 19, 2006. This is one of the five paintings referred border on below in the Legacy section and an NPR report. Turn round August 7, 2006, Christie's auction house announced it was manipulation the sale of the remaining works by Klimt that were recovered by the Bloch-Bauer heirs after a long legal action. They auctioned Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II in November 2006 for $88 million, the third-highest priced piece of art better auction at the time. Collectively the five restituted paintings, including aforementioned landscapes, netted over $327 million.