Gustave Klimt’s Fixation With Gold And Women
Edition #24 - Do you think The Kiss is sexually provocative?
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Gustave Klimt’s Fixation With Gold And Women
By 1897, radical artists in Vienna started disrupting traditional arts and culture.
Artists and intellectuals, including Gustav Klimt, architect Otto Wagner, composers Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schönberg, and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud challenged academic art and started associating themselves with progressive art styles like Art Nouveau.
This was the rise of modernity in Vienna, and the cultural movement was called Vienna Secession (named after an ancient Roman term meaning “revolt against ruling powers.”)
When Gustav Klimt painted murals for the University of Vienna, his sexually provocative paintings scandalized the public.
Medicine reflects the aesthetics of Art Nouveau. Naked men and women with long flowy tentacles of hair, pregnant woman, and obscure shadows having agonizing gestures.
Hygeia, the mythological daughter of the god of medicine, is shown at the bottom of the painting. Her head is adorned with flowers, and her dress is filled with circles. She is feeding a snake from the cup of lethe in her other hand.
Klimt was a prodigious lover. He never married but fathered 14 children from various women. His obsession with women and their erotic depictions made it easy for people to accuse him of pornography.
Judith and the Head of Holofernes (1901) began the period of the “golden epoch” in Klimt’s artistic career.
Judith gazes at the viewer with an overtly sexualized mouth, holding the head of her aggressor Holofernes.
Not long after, Klimt took a trip to Ravenna, Italy, where he saw Byzantine mosaics shimmering with gold leaves. It stuck with him and emanated in his iconic gold paintings.
Perhaps The Kiss (1907) became one of the most compelling artworks in modern art. But what makes it unique?
Is it sexually provocative?
Who are the subjects in this painting? Does it show a symbolic representation of Klimt’s personal love life?
And what does gold signify symbolically?
Klimt features an embracing, entwined couple lost in their world.
The couple literally floats in a gold cosmos.
The entire canvas is filled with sheets of gold leaf.
Klimt used almost eight different types of gold in The Kiss and built a texture underneath the gold leaf to give it a 3-dimensional aspect, to have the light the same way Byzantine mosaics do.
The couple is pictured on a patch of flowers. However, they are teetering at the edge of a cliff.
The man wears a robe with erect black and grey rectangles, signifying masculinity, and the woman’s dress is swathed with spirals and whirls, symbolizing the Ova.
The shape of the entwined couple is itself a Golden Phallic symbol.
It is believed that this is a portrait of Klimt and Emilie Flöge.
Flöge was a businesswoman and an avant-garde fashion designer. Even though they did not marry, they were invested emotionally and intellectually with each other.
The actual life model was more likely to be a woman known as “Red Hilda,” whom Flöge bears a strong resemblance.
The Kiss might be an allegorical representation of the couple.
The gold rush in the painting signifies “desire and beauty.”
It also represents the wealth and opulence of Viennese people during that era.
In my opinion, the picture is sensual yet not provocative.
Their kiss is passionate, and the woman’s eyes are closed like in a trance or ecstasy — the gold surrounding the couple hints at a halo.
Even though Klimt was not romantic and never married, this picture could be his life story of the ambiguous platonic relationship with Flöge.
What do you think about Klimt's oeuvre?
References:
1. The Kiss by Gustav Klimt: Great Art Explained
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