BO Klimt FRE A-OK 19 Jan 2011.qxp
2/7/2011
10:37 AM
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ANCIENT GREEK ART I 1890-1891 Oil on plaster, 230 x 230 cm Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
K
limt’s position as the successor to Makart was yet more clearly established when he inherited the commission to complete the decorations of the staircase of the Kunsthistorische Museum which had been left unfinished when Makart died in 1884. Gustav, Ernst Klimt and Franz Matsch provided forty paintings illustrating the development of art from ancient Egypt, until the Renaissance, in order to decorate the spandrels and the awkward narrow, vertical spaces between the columns. In the eleven panels painted by Gustav Klimt himself between 1890 and 1891, we have the first intimations of his impending break with academic orthodoxy and of the direction he would move in by the end of the decade. The very awkwardness of the panel shapes which did not lend itself to an effective representation of spatial recession may have encouraged Klimt to paint in a flatter and more compressed and stylised manner. For the first time we see that juxtaposition of almost photographically rendered elements (notably the faces) with flat, decorative backgrounds. For the first time, too, Klimt moved on from the passive and rather bovine feminine ideal of academic art, to a female type with some of the “femme fatale” allure that characterises his later depictions of woman.
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