Sara Collantes: Gustav Klimt - NUDA VERITAS

The painter in 1912

Klimt has never been one of my favorite painters; in fact he isn’t in my top five, whose first place has been a never-ending fight for years between Caravaggio and Turner. However, I have to admit that his work is absolutely lovely and completely original. Nowadays his works seem to be very accessible, easily acceptable, and and it’s us women who tend to experiment a magical, inexplicable connection with his paintings at once.

Today, when one first sees a painting by Klimt one might think that it is nice on purpose, made to please, but the eyes and minds of the Viennese in 1890 were not as used as ours to seeing such sensual and, on occasions, explicit sex gestures. He was accused of being provocative and sometimes even “sexually perverted and pornographic”.

Palas, 1898

Klimt belongs to neither the 19th nor the 20th century; however, he knew how to combine challenges and unite both historicism and symbolism, as well as naturalism and abstraction, in one single painting. He lived between the academicism of Makart and the unstoppable advance of the expressionism of Kokoschka and Egon Schiele. Therefore, we can’t classify him into a specific style. But in a time and place where a breakthrough of originality had been asked, Klimt was the answer.

He once said (quote) about his own art: 

“I have never painted a self-portrait. I am less interested in myself as a subject for a painting than I am in other people, above all women… There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night … Whoever wants to know something about me … ought to look carefully at my pictures.”

The Kiss, 1908

Klimt adored women; they were his main theme above all others. He surrendered himself to the feminine symbolism to depict the hypocritical Viennese society. Women were claiming for new positions on both an ideological and cultural level, always overshadowed by their wealthy bourgeois husbands. The female body was the main subject of his paintings, and he explored the sensuality of feminine beauty, from the kindest joy of pure love to the arrogant power of the “femme fatale”.

Medicine Hygieia, 1901

Judith, 1901

Many artists had tried to express the beauty of romance. Klimt captured the power of romantic love in his worldwide known painting “The Kiss”, which is a celebration of pleasure, joy and life. But “his” women aren’t always so tender as the one in The Kiss. They are also fascinating, irresistible sorceresses who provoke an inevitable attraction. Such unbelievable strength lies in Palas Athenea, Danae or Hygieia. They look at us saucily, insolently, trying to rouse the spectator. In my opinion, the proudest, most shameless of these women is one hanging in my room, Judith. She’s the paradigm of the femme fatale, even in the Biblical story in which she beheads Holofernes in order to save the Jewish people. But in this case, the painting loses its Biblical meaning on behalf of the woman’s seductive power. She’s delightfully vicious, charmingly sinful and fascinatingly perverse. Klimt demonstrated here the undeniable erotic superiority of women.

There’s a movie I haven’t seen it yet but it’s in my list of must-see films, based on Klimt’s life and featuring one of my favorite actors, John Malkovich.

Let me end up saying that Klimt is a delightful painter who devoted his entire life to women, so we in return should give him some of this love back.