| Artist: | Klimt, Gustav |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Portrait of Friedericke Maria Beer | |
| Date of Work: | 1916 | |
| Nationality: | Austrian | |
| Context: | 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. Elaborate surface with no focus on the inner self; a good example of the beautiful facade of Art Nouveau (or Jugendstil as it was called in German-speaking countries). Klimt asked his sitter to turn her jacket inside-out so he could add the pattern of the lining to his already overloaded composition. The background pattern is a blown-up version of a Korean vase design, from his personal collection. The woman as a beautiful, ornamental art object (a stylized flower) rather than a psychological study. Friedericke Beer also had her portrait painted by Egon Schiele, but with differing results (see the text that accompanies that image). Style: the entire surface is covered with patterned, ornamental filler in a spce negating horror vacuii; the decorative overlay. Highly stylized and surface oriented; the hands and face are all that is left of the figure. 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, studied 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. | ||
