Few painters are more recognizable than Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). For the profane eye, it is easy to confuse certain landscapes and portraits by Monet with some by Renoir, to attribute a cubist guitar by Georges Braque to Juan Gris, or to doubt a drawing in which Ramon Casas exhibited the resolute and mocking line of a Toulouse-Lautrec. But Klimt’s most iconic paintings are just that, iconic.
And they are in more ways than one. They seduce us with the luxurious gilding of profane Byzantine icons, they dazzle us with their small transparent colored tesserae, which evoke the play of light from Gothic stained glass windows, Andalusian mosaics or Murano glass. From these variegated, exuberant backgrounds, slender, hieratic, priestly, unreal and purely stylized bodies emerge. Impossible to confuse The Kiss with any other modernist work, right?
However, if the Austrian did one thing throughout his career, it was soaking up influences. And not only those of his companions, the artists of the Vienna Secession, a group that Klimt himself chaired and helped found.
How much does Klimt’s Kiss owe to Rodin’s? Both met during a stay of the French sculptor in Vienna, of both a collection of erotic nudes in pencil that explore angles and postures of the female body that no gallery of the time would have dared to show outside the back room is preserved. For his part, beyond a brief visit to Paris in 1909, Klimt hardly traveled, but he did not miss one of the many foreign exhibitions that came to his hometown.
In Klimt’s artistic career, the exoticism of Lawrence Alma-Tadema can be traced. His Roman and Egyptian paintings inspired much of the Viennese’s early work and, in later life, left their mark in hairstyles and poses, as well as in his love of friezes.
The sinuous elegance of Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, a modernist of the Glasgow school, is also undeniably akin to the minimalist reveries of the Viennese. The same can be said of the Dutchman Jan Toorop and his fairy tale scenes. From the Belgian Fernand Khnopff, Klimt inherited a taste for mystery and fantastic elements.
All these artists share with Klimt the attention to the line, the taste for the female figure and a certain unreality, the feeling of not knowing if we are before the portrait of a woman, a statue, an apparition or a dream.
Beyond the Art Nouveau or Symbolist influences, which are not unpredictable, because they served to shape the artist’s famous golden period, the Belvedere Museum exhibition reveals others that are much more surprising and unexpected. We find ourselves, for example, in front of a Viennese version – much more demure, yes – of the scandalous Madame X by John Singer Sargent.
Everything is similar in this lady, also anonymous: the composition, the upright pose, the dark dress, the face in profile in a three-quarter body… Everything except the captivating insolence of Sargent’s model, which Klimt did not know or he did not want to emulate.
But the imprint of impressionism is more evident in his landscapes, a genre that Gustav did not tackle until the second half of his career, but in which he even ventured some pointillist experiments.
His aquatic views owe a more than obvious debt to Monet. The reflection of the trees and the sky in the water acquires an evanescence that borders on abstraction. Its forests and flower meadows, on the other hand, end up paying a visible homage to Van Gogh. The twisted branches of his avenue in the park of Castle Kammer, with its thick lines and bold violet brushstrokes, might have come from the red-haired Dutchman’s brush.
It took a stroke and a flu that turned into pneumonia to end the life of Gustav Klimt, at the age of fifty-six, in the midst of an epidemic in 1918. It is difficult to foresee what paths his art would have taken if he had lived a little longer, but curiosity never left him. His latest works revisit the human figure with a color that moves away from the preciousness of his golden period and flirts with the radicalism of Fauvism and Expressionism.
Vibrant echoes of Henri Matisse can be seen in his portrait of Johanna Staude, painted shortly before her death. Far from resting on his laurels of success, the Viennese knew how to keep his eyes wide open until the last moment, absorbing the findings of the avant-garde of his time to translate them into his own pictorial language.
