Klimt (Taschen Basic Art Series)

by Gilles Neret (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2011

  $7.10

  The unfading popularity of Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) attests not only to the particular appeal of his luxuriant painting but also to the universal themes with which he worked: love, feminine beauty, aging, and death.The son of a goldsmith, Klimt created surfaces of ornate and jewel-like luminosity which show the influence of both Egyptian and Japanese art. Through paintings, murals, and friezes, his work is defined by radiant color, fluid lines, floral elements, and mosaic-like patterning.With subjects ranging from sensuality and desire to anxiety and despair, all this iridescence is also suffused with feeling. Klimt's numerous images of women, characterized by curvaceous forms, tender flesh, red lips, and flushed cheeks, were particularly charged with passion, at a time when such frank eroticism was still taboo in Viennese upper-middle-class society.This book presents a selection of Klimt's work, introducing his pictorial world of decoration and desire, as well as his influence on artists to come.

• Used

  Paperback
  1994

  $5.13

• Used

  Hardcover
  2006

  $5.13

  Gustav Klimt's art is thoroughly fin de siecle. It expresses the apocalyptic atmosphere of Vienna's upper middle-class society - a society devoted to the cultivation of aesthetic awareness and the cult of pleasure. The ecstatic joy, which Klimt (1862-1918) and his contemporaries found - or hoped to find - in beauty, was constantly overshadowed by death, and death therefore plays an important role in Klimt's art. Klimt's fame, however, rests on his reputation as one of the greatest erotic painters and graphic artists of his times. Particularly his drawings, which have been widely admired for their artistic excellence, are dominated by the erotic portrayal of women. Klimt saw the world in female form. Author Gottfried Fliedl also discusses the Secession movement and Klimt's role within this important group of artists.

• New

  Paperback
  1998

  $19.02

  Gustave Klimt (1862-1918) was one of the most brilliant artists of the Austrian avant-garde. Admired for his sensual images of women and for his powerful and original vision, he produced some of the most haunting and evocative images of all time, including The Kiss, Love and The Three Ages of Woman, all of which are included in this perfect introduction to the artist's work. Klimt started out as a decorator, opening a studio with his brother Ernst. Some of his most famous commissions were for murals, including the magnificent Beethoven Frieze, painted for the exhibition of Max Klinger's statue of Beethoven, and the monumental ceiling paintings for the auditorium of Vienna University, which shocked a conservative public. A founder of Vienna Secession, the band of artists who resigned from the established art bodies to form their own group, Klimt became the principal painter of the Art Nouveau movement, painting glittering portraits of fashionable Viennese society as well as startling and erotic allegories.