Klimt and Schiele: Drawings

by Gustav Klimt (artist), Egon Schiele (Artist), Katie Hanson (Contributor)

Provocative, erotic and insightful drawings by two major artists of fin-de-siècle Vienna Although Gustav Klimt was Egon Schiele’s senior by almost 30 years, he quickly recognized and encouraged the younger artist’s extraordinary talent, and they remained mutually admiring colleagues until the shared year of their deaths, in 1918. The 60 important drawings exquisitely reproduced in this large-format volume reach from each artist’s early academic studies to more incisive and unconventional explorations of nature, psychology, sexuality and spirituality. Striking and provocative even today, these works led both artists into controversy (and even a brief imprisonment for Schiele) during their creators’ lifetimes. Klimt advised, “Whoever wants to know something about me as an artist ought to look carefully at my pictures and try to recognize in them what I am and what I want.” This album of unforgettable drawings from the collection of the Albertina Museum, Vienna, provides a direct connection to the minds of two master draftsmen exploring the limits of representation, as well as the shock of recognition at seeing our own inner selves caught on paper. Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) and Egon Schiele (1890–1918) were two of the most daring and controversial artists in Vienna during the culturally turbulent decades around the turn of the 20th century. They worked out their provocative depictions of the human body, created in a search for psychological truth as well as physical realism, in the direct and intimate medium of drawing. In Klimt’s studies, the distinctive character or unsettling emotional resonance of the person portrayed comes through in the artist’s delicate, sinuous lines. The striking presence of the individual in Schiele’s more finished drawings, often rendered with extreme frankness and bold coloration, pulses with dramatic immediacy.

Genres: Art

150 pages, Hardcover

Published February 27, 2018

About the author

Gustav Klimt was born in Baumgarten, near Vienna, the second of seven children — three boys and four girls. All three sons displayed artistic talent early on. His father, Ernst Klimt, formerly from Bohemia, was a gold engraver. Ernst married Anna Klimt (née Finster), whose unrealized ambition was to be a musical performer. Klimt lived in poverty for most of his childhood, as work was scarce and economic advancement was difficult for immigrants.

In 1876, Klimt was awarded a scholarship to the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts (Kunstgewerbeschule), where he studied until 1883, and received training as an architectural painter. He revered the foremost history painter of the time, Hans Makart. Klimt readily accepted the principles of a conservative training; his early work may be classified as academic. In 1877 his brother Ernst, who, like his father, would become an engraver, also enrolled in the school. The two brothers and their friend Franz Matsch began working together; by 1880 they had received numerous commissions as a team they called the "Company of Artists", and helped their teacher in painting murals in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Klimt began his professional career painting interior murals and ceilings in large public buildings on the Ringstraße including a successful series of "Allegories and Emblems".

In 1888, Klimt received the Golden order of Merit from Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria for his contributions to murals painted in the Burgtheater in Vienna. He also became an honorary member of the University of Munich and the University of Vienna. In 1892 both Klimt's father and brother Ernst died, and he had to assume financial responsibility for his father's and brother's families. The tragedies affected his artistic vision as well, and soon he would veer toward a new personal style. In the early 1890s, Klimt met Emilie Flöge, who, notwithstanding the artist's relationships with other women, was to be his companion until the end of his life. Whether his relationship with Flöge was sexual or not is debated, but during that period Klimt fathered at least 14 children.

--Wikipedia

Reviews

[Servabo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gustav Klimt and Egon Shiele began their careers amid the opulence and upheaval of the turn of the 20th century in Vienna and achieved greatness in the shadow of the Great War, one of the greatest confrontational and violent military conquests recorded. They lived lives of passion, of engagement in experimental culture, and with a great and sustaining commitment to their art. They were connected to each other - Klimt the encouraging elder statesman, Schiele filled with respect; showing together, questioning together and of each other - and shared a dedication to continual personal and artistic introspection. The contradictory world around them was their subject: lives lived in splendor, in squalor, in community, desperately alone. Klimt's and Schiele's willingness to explore and give form to the raw, the instinctual, the sexual and the emotional unknown allows us to see their work as alive in our moment, filled with the urgency and search for expression that mark our own time.

For many there has always been a sense of intimacy in looking at drawings, an impression of proximity to the hand and mind of the maker. This idea of contact is enhanced by the artists' own words, allowing us to understand images in relation to the thoughts that framed their making. This publication and the exhibition it accompanies bring the immediacy of art-making into our experience in ways that pay honor to the artists' intentions.

Even after 100 years, their drawings have a compelling immediacy, a sense of energy and presence, of searching and questioning, that still feels fresh. Both artists welcomed deep engagement with their art, a kind of looking that encompassed feeling and seeking.

Klimt's drawings are often delicate, while Schiele's are regularly bold. Klimt's drawings were typically preparatory for a painting, whereas Schiele considered his own as finished, independent pictures and routinely sold them. His drawings often employ intense watercolors of varying degrees of opaqueness that heighten the impact of the forms, while Klimt worked mostly in monochrome and line. And yet, despite these disparities, their works are related in ways that highlight what makes both artists' drawings rewarding and challenging to contemplate.

Both artists' drawings embody a tension between artifice and authenticity - between a graphic quality that draws attention to itself and a sense of raw and authentic psychological presence. In Schiele's drawings, the poses often appear odd and theatrical, contrived rather than casually observed. And yet, the awkward, unidealized bodies convincingly convey an encounter with a real, unique human being. In Klimt's portrait drawings, the distinctive individual's pose, gesture, or expression holds amid the decorative effect of his sinuous lines. His allegorical figures defy conventions with their naturalism and their embodiment of unseemly themes.

Schiele advised an aspiring artist: "You must work with all your energy, incessantly and seriously, to attain the skill and ability that allow you to represent visually your spiritual life, your worldview and your impressions of life." In his drawings, we encounter his precocious talent and his developing sense of self and of the world around him as he matured into a brief adulthood cut short at the age of 28. Klimt, too, recognized his work as an extension of himself: "Whoever wants to know something about me as an artist ought to carefully examine my pictures and seek to recognize in them what I am and what I want." These words, Klimt's and Schiele's both, remind us that to be with a work of art is to come close to the artist and to his way of experiencing the world around him; being with their drawings is a form of travel - into another place and time, and another's view of life.

1) Gustav Klimt: Lady with Plumed Hat, 1908