Vienna celebrates Klimt’s anniversary Automatic translate

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), an Austrian modernist genius, connoisseur of female beauty, and simply an artist who was fanatically devoted to his work.

Klimt was not interested in self-portraits. He was interested in women. That is why his works are overtly erotic. Klimt was a portraitist of wealthy Viennese ladies. The portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, for example, is today one of the most expensive paintings in the world.

And his life partner, the fashion designer Emilie Flöge, looks soft and infinitely feminine in his paintings.

Klimt’s most famous painting, “The Kiss”, is in the Belvedere. There you can also see “Judith”. This year, Vienna’s museums are hosting many special exhibitions dedicated to the artist’s work.

Vienna’s Belvedere has as many as 22 Klimt paintings - the largest collection of his work in the world. There are some paintings in the Leopold Museum, the Albertina, the Vienna Museum and the Museum Quarter. Documents relating to Klimt and his time are in the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) as well as in the National Library. In the anniversary year, all these places organize thematic exhibitions.

In the 1900s, culture and art were booming in Vienna. Literature, painting, music and architecture were constantly being produced. With two million inhabitants in 1910, Vienna was the fifth largest city in the world and undoubtedly one of the centers of cultural life in Europe.

Together with his brother Ernst Klimt and the painter and sculptor Franz Mach, Gustav Klimt was commissioned to decorate some of the buildings on Ringstrasse. The staircases in the Art History Museum and the Burgtheater are also his work.

In 1897 Klimt and other artists founded “the Vienna Secession”. This artistic association was a kind of protest against outdated notions of art. Klimt painted the Beethoven frieze for the hall of the Secession. The Stokle Palace in Brussels was also created in Art Nouveau style and is a unique monument of that time. Klimt worked on it with the architect Josef Hoffmann.

In 1903, together with the same Josef Hoffmann and Kolo Moser, Klimt founded the Vienna Workshop, which for a long time changed society’s understanding of design.

Klimt’s creativity and style gave way to new artists of the time. These include, for example, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka. Klimt’s pure eco-creations influence people’s minds, hearts and perceptions even today. Thanks to him, that era stirs the imagination and is shrouded in a halo of mystery.

Dehos Unik