August 21 and 22 2012
Our class spend Tuesday and Wednesday touring two of the most important art museums in Vienna, where some of the most important paintings in the art world are currently on display. On Tuesday, we visited the interior of the upper Belvedere, and we then spent Wednesday in the Leopold Museum in the famous museum quarter of Vienna. These museums are both massive, and display many important pieces of art, however I decided to compress my descriptions of these museums into a single blog post because I feel Dr. O discussed the same subject at both museums, and I would be able to provide a better historical perspective on what she covered if I discussed what I saw on both days side by side. I'm choosing to focus on the works of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, and the way their worked tied into and shaped the secession movement in Vienna. I'm choosing to focus on this because I feel most of what was on display at the Belvedere and the Leopold Museum could be described as Baroque art, and I feel I've discussed the topic to a satisfactory extend in the rest of my blog describing something I have not discussed before, art after the Baroque era.
I had heard about Gustav Klimt long before I first saw his works on display in the Belvedere, but I had not known very much about the artist himself, or the importance of his career. I knew The Kiss was a very popular and celebrate painting, as it had been on display all over the city in various forms, appearing on everything from umbrellas to coffee mugs. But it was Dr. O's lecture that showed me how important the piece of art actually was. The kiss is indeed a beautiful piece of art, but it is also historically important, as it is representative of one of the first new innovations in art seen in Vienna since the end of the Baroque era many years earlier. As Dr. O explained, one of the reasons I had been seeing Gothic and Baroque architectural designs all over the city was that the people of Vienna had fallen into the practice of emulating past designs and styles. Vienna, in keeping with it's reputation for conservatism, had adopted a historicist style in art and design, meaning that people in the 19th century wanted to paint and design using styles from the 17th, and 18th centuries, or in some cases the 14th or 15th century. This had the effect of stopping or delaying Viennese innovation in art, as all the people spending money building on the ring strasse didn't want anything new. However, a small number of painters like Klimt and Schiele were painting and creating in new styles. The Kiss one of Klimt's most famous works, but it also serves as an example of the unique type of artistic experimentation he was doing. Painted in what Dr. O. refereed to as Klimt's gold period, the picture uses a lot of high gloss golden paint, along with bright oranges and yellows, that give the painting a very distinct visual appearance. Klimt intergraded his education in applied arts with his experimentation in fine art, and added gold leaf to a large number of his paintings, explaining the unusual shine and simmer seen on The Kiss and other paintings. The exhibit at the also showed that Klimt continued his experimentation late into his career, as he started experimenting with techniques used impressionists and even expressionists like Schiele.
The Belvedere held a number of Schiele's most famous works that served to define the expressionist style that he pioneered. The Expressionist style is perhaps best defined by Schiele's Death and the Maiden. This style shows objects distorted and warped like an impressionist style would, except the distortions are representative of the objects nature in some way, and serve to communicate a narrative about the paintings subject. Death and the Maiden for example shows a young women with an very pale pallor clinging to a intensely grief stricken. The colors in the painting are consist of dark grays and browns, suggesting a negative mood. The girl looks sickly and weak, and her arms are thin and twig like to imply her lack of strength and vigor. The man in contrast has thicker arms and a less pale complexion. According to Dr. O., Schiele painted his portrait for a mistress he left because he had the feeling that she would suddenly grow ill and pass away. The painting attempts to visual express Schiele's fear's for his mistress's health, was well has his grief for having to leave her. Given Schiele's motivation behind the painting, viewing it allows one to perceive how the expressionist style communicated information about moods, personalty, and circumstance through visual distortion.
The historical significance of Klimt and Schiele's artistic styles was only revealed to us the next day, when Dr. O. explained why 3 of Klimt's most famous works were rejected by the University of Vienna. Klimt was commissioned to paint 3 paintings for the school, one depicting jurisprudence for the law school, one depicting medicine for the law school, and one depicting philosophy. The Klimt painted the commissioned works using his new art style, however the university rejected them, because they did not consider them to be appropriate. Klimt later sent them to a art contest in Paris, where two of the three pieces one first prize, and though the victory gained him the prestige in Vienna that the university claimed he had lacked, the experience had soured Klimts opinion of the Viennese art scene. This led Klimt and Schiele, along with a number of other artist working in new styles, to found the secession movement in Vienna. The Secession movement was a rejection of the ringstrasse's historicist style and it's rejection of creativity in favor of tradition. Instead, it was a celebration of new ideas. The Secession movement founded their own art gallery, where new works such as expressionist art was displayed and promoted, and where artistic creativity could thrive in a culture that did not support it. The secession movement grew into a significant counter culture to the conservative culture of the Viennese art world, and the gallery where Klimt and Schiele displayed there works is still open for viewing today.
I knew that Klimt and Schiele were famous artists before touring the Leopold museum with Dr. O, but that was the first time I learned about the secession movement, and how the artists were organized into a union of disfranchised artists. I was surprised to learn that such famous and well regard artists faced such obstacles to success in their own times. Dr. O simply commented that the Viennese required someone to make their name somewhere other than Vienna before they would be taken seriously in the art world, and this is certainly true in the cases of Klimt and Schiele.
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