Published by MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Text by Katie Hanson.
Although Gustav Klimt was Egon Schiele’s senior by almost 30 years, he quickly recognized and encouraged the younger artist’s extraordinary talent, and they remained mutually admiring colleagues until the shared year of their deaths, in 1918.
The 60 important drawings exquisitely reproduced in this large-format volume reach from each artist’s early academic studies to more incisive and unconventional explorations of nature, psychology, sexuality and spirituality. Striking and provocative even today, these works led both artists into controversy (and even a brief imprisonment for Schiele) during their creators’ lifetimes. Klimt advised, “Whoever wants to know something about me as an artist ought to look carefully at my pictures and try to recognize in them what I am and what I want.” This album of unforgettable drawings from the collection of the Albertina Museum, Vienna, provides a direct connection to the minds of two master draftsmen exploring the limits of representation, as well as the shock of recognition at seeing our own inner selves caught on paper.
Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) and Egon Schiele (1890–1918) were two of the most daring and controversial artists in Vienna during the culturally turbulent decades around the turn of the 20th century. They worked out their provocative depictions of the human body, created in a search for psychological truth as well as physical realism, in the direct and intimate medium of drawing. In Klimt’s studies, the distinctive character or unsettling emotional resonance of the person portrayed comes through in the artist’s delicate, sinuous lines. The striking presence of the individual in Schiele’s more finished drawings, often rendered with extreme frankness and bold coloration, pulses with dramatic immediacy.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Edited by Ursula Storch.
Nowhere is the fabled sensuality of Gustav Klimt more apparent than in the tapering limpidity of his drawings. Now, in celebration of the artist’s 150th birthday, this volume draws on the world’s largest collection of Klimt drawings, at the Vienna Museum, to offer a thorough account of around 400 works by the artist. Drawings are arranged in thematic groups, such as the Secession works, sketches for the Faculty Paintings (also known as the University of Vienna Ceiling Paintings) and the nudes. The book also includes paintings from the Vienna Museum collection, such as the portrait of Emilie Flöge (1902), as well as posters and prints designed for the Viennese Secession (including a number of original drafts, as well as the first prints), plus photographs of some extraordinary memorabilia, such as the artist’s smock, his death mask and a drawing of Klimt’s body by Egon Schiele. Also featured are rare vintage prints of early portrait photographs and sculptures. With more than 500 color reproductions, this volume constitutes a uniquely broad overview of the artist’s legendary virtuoso draughtsmanship. Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) was a founding member and president of the Vienna Secession. Trained academically, Klimt infused allegory painting with an eroticism that was frequently deemed controversial--perhaps most notoriously in his allegorical portraits of “Philosophy,” “Medicine” and “Jurisprudence,” for the ceiling of the Great Hall in the University of Vienna, which were destroyed by the German army in 1945. His later paintings of the “Golden Phase” expressed his love of Byzantine art.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Edited by Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, Beate Murr. Text by Rainald Franz, Anette Freytag, Beate Murr, Elisabeth Schmuttermeier, Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, Johannes Wieninger.
In 1905, Adolphe Stoclet commissioned a private mansion in Brussels. Josef Hoffmann designed the home and its garden, and the many artists and friends of the Wiener Werkstätte decorated all of the rooms. The end result was a true synthesis of the arts, an exquisitely realized environment whose residents would carefully dress so as to complement their surroundings. But it was the contribution of Gustav Klimt that would become the Stoclet Palace’s most famous component: a three-part mosaic frieze for the dining room, consisting of 15 separate components inlaid with gold, enamel and semi-precious stones. On the occasion of the recent completion of the frieze’s restoration--the only one of Klimt’s murals that survived the aerial bombardments of World War II--this publication examines Klimt’s methods and compares his instructions with the work’s execution.
Gustav Klimt: The Collection of the Wien Museum
Gustav Klimt: Expectation and Fulfillment