| Artist: | Klimt, Gustav |
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|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Portrait of Frau Adele Block-Bauer | |
| Date of Work: | 1907 | |
| Nationality: | Austrian | |
| Context: | Pre-WWI, Vienna | |
| Movement: | Art Nouveau/Jugendstil | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: portrait of a Viennese lady, but the figure is almost swallowed by the abstract background pattern. Mood of detachment. Elaborate surface with no focus on the inner self; the woman is treated as a beautiful art object (a stylized flower) rather than a psychological study. The painting is an elegant example of the beautiful facade of Art Nouveau (or Jugendstil as it was called in German-speaking countries). A close-up of the surface pattern reveals various symbolic forms: the spiral, the Egyptian eye, phallic shapes, and a split circular shape that has been seen as a masked symbol of the vagina. The body turns into ornament, but the ornament references the body. Interplay of the manifest (surface) and the latent (subtext). Klimt paints from outside in. Style: the entire surface is covered with jewelled, ornamental filler in a space negating horror vacuii; the decorative overlay. Highly stylized and surface oriented; it is as if the ornamental frame has flooded the interior field. The hands and face are all that is left of the figure. Mosaic pattern of precious, metallic materials, recalling the influence of Byzantine mosaics from San Vitale in Ravenna that the artist had recently seen. Tension between the 3-D representational elements and the 2-D abstract surface elaboration. Body gives way to flat pattern design in a sensory overload. Airless repetition of pattern, claustrophobic. Context: Vienna, the city of Freud, becomes the backdrop for Klimt's elaborate surfaces that mask over any repressed content. It was a city of beautiful facades with all kinds of repressed desires and anxieties lurking undercover; it was the city in which Freud discovered the unconscious, studies hysteria, and did his dream interpretations, looking past the manifest surface to the latent content. It was the city in which the beautiful facade would eventually give way to the psyche. | ||
