Product Description

Gustav Klimt's art is thoroughly fin de siecle. It expresses the apocalyptic atmosphere of Vienna's upper middle-class society - a society devoted to the cultivation of aesthetic awareness and the cult of pleasure. The ecstatic joy which Klimt and his contemporaries found - or hoped to find - in beauty was constantly overshadowed by death. And death therefore plays an important role in Klimt's art. Klimt's fame, however, rests on his reputation as one of the greatest erotic painters and graphic artists of his times. In particular, his drawings, which have been widely admired for their artistic excellence, are dominated by the erotic portrayal of women. Klimt saw the world "in female form".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #33853 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

About the Author
Federico Zeri, an eminent art historian and critic, was vice president of the National Council for Cultural and Environmental Treasures and was decorated with the Legion of Honor by the French Government. He passed away in 1998.

Customer Reviews

Beautiful Color Reproductions!!
Klimt is my favorite artist and yet it is so difficult to find quality reproductions of his works; usually the color is faded or the gold leaf comes out a sickly yellow!! This book has beautiful reproductions and concise and informative explanations next to each painting as well as an interesting biography on Klimt. I highly recommend this book for a clear, concise overview.

Great reproductions of the paintings, less satisfactory text.
Christmas presents - how I love them! This year Miss Santa Claus (it is now an equal opportunities position) brought me this fine book.

The great strength of the book is its many fine reproductions of Klimt's paintings, there must be over 100, plus drawings and posters. We can follow the evolution of the artists style through these: from early highly proficient drawings and neo-classically styled paintings to his mature style in which he relishes surface texture and the female form.

Gottfried Fliedl's take on the artist in the text is less successful. His school of art criticism does not comment on the art in itself, it sees it mainly as the outworking of socio-political forces and philosophical ideas. When considering an artist like Klimt I cannot but help think that this misses out so much that is important.

Fliedl is right to concentrate on Klimt's depiction of the feminine, but due to his interpretive tunnel vision he misses much that is of importance, indeed he misses much of Klimt's unique vision and gift to art. So many things seem to be missed by Fliedl's method of analysis: sympathy, sensitivity, humanity, and empathy.

To give an example: one of the revolutionary aspects of Klimt's art was the naturalistic and sympathetic way he depicted women. His nudes are quite different from those before them. They are not high class pornography. There is nothing of a man's idealisation and objectification of the female form for his own amusement. Instead in many paintings Klimt depicts the female form in a natural and unaffected way, even if these depictions are within highly stylised compositions. Fliedl gathers many of the best of these paintings in a chapter entitled Hope, after the title of a painting of a pregnant women. Then rather than discuss the paintings he spends his time on a pseudo-political rant about the oppression of female models.

One chapter contains a selection of Klimt's drawings that are described as `erotic' here, for `erotic' read pornographic. Klimt's usual portraits of the female form may be said to be erotic in the best sense of the word, these voyeuristic drawings come across as second rate by comparison. Rich appreciation of the feminine being replaced by cheap titillation.

Klimt's landscape paintings are covered in two chapters, they show the same fascination with surface detail that his other paintings do, but there is a sense that there simply isn't the same richness as in his pictures containing figures.

Overall this is a book well worth buying due to the quality, number and variety of the reproductions of Klimt`s paintings.