It stood as a monument to the movement that pioneered modernism and international arts in a conservative Vienna and helped the city establish itself as a centre of cultural excellence.The great artist is represented by many of his works, all somehow related to the 1916-17 ‘Portrait of a Lady’ owned by Galleria Ricci Oddi which is the fulcrum of the exhibition: a painting that is doubly mysterious, firstly because it is painted over top of a previous portrait once believed to have been lost, and secondly because it was stolen in 1997 and found again in 2019 following a series of events which is still unclear today. It was built by Joseph Olbrich who designed it with clean white walls and intricate gold decorations. The Secession Building was built in 1897 on the City’s Ringstrasse where everyone could see it as they went about Vienna. The group was so successful it was able to fund the building of a new centre for their works. He and Klimt fell into a contest over who could create the best works, and while both had a unique style, the similarities come from the secession and its principles. He did this most successfully in his self portraits. The figures he painted were often in a contorted pose and he extenuated their characteristics with hard lines and sharp corners. This art spoke to the viewer directly through form, colour and emotion rather than plane realism.Īnother artist of the movement, who took over Klimt’s responsibilities’ in 1905, was Egon Schiele. Klimt’s painting, Judith I (1901), depicts the biblical character holding the head of St John as she looks out to the viewer with an unnerving expression of seduction and ecstasy. Emotion through facial expression, was something new but very important to the artists of the secession. Perspective is abolished in favour of flat planes with just a carpet of flowers beneath them to ground the couple in some sort of reality. The couple that embrace in the middle are surrounded by blocks of colour, patterned shapes and gold Klimt’s signature colour. Klimt’s most famous piece, indeed, one of the most famous of all paintings, was The Kiss (painted in 1907-8) as It represented everything the movement came to signify. It not only covered fine art but also design, architecture and crafts, allowing various forms to unite under one artistic language There was a clear objective behind the Secession to promote international art in Austria and develop a more modernist and progressive convention. They held 24 large scale exhibitions between that year and 1905, with responses in equal amounts of praise and criticism. But in 1897 he and many other members, including Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann, established their own group that would be known as the Vienna Secession. Klimt had risen to fame painting murals in the magnificent Burgtheatre and History of Art Museum in the City and they conformed to the conventional ideas of realism, as did most of his early works. With new ideas of symbolism occurring in Vienna and throughout Europe some members, notably Gustav Klimt, sort a way of representing the world through pictorial instincts rather than pure reality. It was founded in 1897 but continued to develop ideas through the first decades of the 20th Century.Īlthough the Kunstlerhaus held exhibitions for the city’s artists, the senior members favoured classical techniques and realistic paintings meaning that impressionist and modernist works were rejected. The Vienna Secession was a break away art movement set up by artists disillusioned with the traditional and oppressive art body the Kunstlerhaus.
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