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You crack me up, Fiona! Maybe you are "narrow-minded." Maybe you just know what you like. But you came up with an interesting list of principles. I think, in the end, you see the general trend of modernism toward "art for art's sake" where design and formal beauty are paramount. But here's a way to think about it. Your principles produce art that you love--the flip side is that each principle also results in a style/movement/work you DON'T like. It's sort of the law of unintended consequences. Maybe if you simply recognize this paradox--and therefore recognize the merit of some of those movements--that will help you as you navigate modern art. You notice I said "recognize the merit of some of those movements"--never said you had to find the work personally appealing. ;-)

A few years ago I had a student in my Ren-1855 section first who then followed me into modernism. He HATED modernism. He had just loved Baroque art in particular and for most of the semester in modernism I could see him sitting there with his arms crossed, looking utterly suspicious of everything I presented. At the end of the semester, though, he conceded that there were ideas he had found compelling and that although he will always be a figurative painter working in a naturalistic style, he had absorbed a few points he thought useful for his own art.

So you never know.

EC 6 Dec

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I honestly was not interested in, or even disliked many of the modernist movements. I only wanted to include artists that I liked in my padlet project and I didn't want to work on this project that much :/ I think I'm narrow-minded. 

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I honestly was not interested in, or even disliked many of the modernist movements. I only wanted to include artists that I liked in my padlet project and I didn't want to work on this project that much :/ I think I'm narrow-minded. 

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Léon Bakst ( Russian: Леон (Лев) Николаевич Бакст, Leon (Lev) Nikolaevich Bakst) - born as Leyb-Khaim Izrailevich (later Samoylovich) Rosenberg, Лейб-Хаим Израилевич (Самойлович) Розенберг (27 January (8 February) 1866 - 28 December 1924) was a Russian painter and scene and costume designer.

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Odilon Redon (April 22, 1840 -- July 6, 1916) was a Symbolist painter and printmaker, born in Bordeaux, Aquitaine, France. Redon started drawing as a young child, and at the age of 10 he was awarded a drawing prize at school.

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Bachelor of Natural History Illustration

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Odilon Redon (born Bertrand Redon; French: ; 20 April 1840 - 6 July 1916) was a French Symbolist artist.

Early in his career, both before and after fighting in the Franco-Prussian War, Redon worked almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography, works known as his noirs. He gained recognition after his drawings were mentioned in the 1884 novel ( Against Nature) by Joris-Karl Huysmans. During the 1890s, Redon began working in pastel and oil, which quickly became his favorite medium, abandoning his previous style of noirs completely after 1900. He developed a keen interest in Hindu and Buddhist religion and culture, which increasingly showed in his work.

Redon is perhaps best known today for the dreamlike paintings created in the first decade of the 20th century, which were inspired by Japanese art and leaned toward abstraction. His work is considered a precursor to Surrealism.

Odilon Redon was born in Bordeaux, Aquitaine, to a prosperous family. Redon's father made his fortune in the slave trade in Louisiana in the 1830s. Redon was conceived in New Orleans and the couple made the transatlantic journey back to France while his mother Marie Guérin, a French Creole woman, was pregnant with his brother Gaston. The young Bertrand Redon acquired the nickname "Odilon" from his mother's first name, Odile. Redon started drawing as a child; at the age of ten, he was awarded a drawing prize at school. He began the formal study of drawing at fifteen but, at his father's insistence, he changed to architecture. Failure to pass the entrance exams at Paris' École des Beaux-Arts ended any plans for a career as an architect, although he briefly studied painting there under Jean-Léon Gérôme in 1864. (His younger brother Gaston Redon would become a noted architect.)

Back in his native Bordeaux, he took up sculpting, and Rodolphe Bresdin instructed him in etching and lithography. His artistic career was interrupted in 1870 when he was drafted to serve in the army in the Franco-Prussian War until its end in 1871.

Self-Portrait, 1880, Musée d'Orsay

At the end of the war, Redon moved to Paris and resumed working almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography. He called his visionary works, conceived in shades of black, his noirs. It was not until 1878 that his work gained any recognition with Guardian Spirit of the Waters; he published his first album of lithographs, titled Dans le Rêve, in 1879. Still, Redon remained relatively unknown until the appearance in 1884 of a cult novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans titled ( Against Nature). The story featured a decadent aristocrat who collected Redon's drawings.

In 1886, Redon exhibited his work with the Impressionists in their the last exhibition. The same year, he also began participating in the exhibitions of Les XX in Brussels.

In the 1890s, Redon worked in pastel and oil; he did not make noirs after 1900. In 1899, he exhibited with the Nabis at Durand-Ruel's.

Redon had a keen interest in Hindu and Buddhist religion and culture. The figure of the Buddha increasingly showed in his work. Influences of Japonisme blended into his art, such as the painting The Death of the Buddha around 1899, The Buddha in 1906, Jacob and the Angel in 1905, and Vase with Japanese Warrior in 1905, among others.

Trees on a yellow Background, one of the panels painted in 1901 for the dining room of the Château de Domecy-sur-le-Vault[16]

Baron Robert de Domecy (1867-1946) commissioned Redon in 1899 to create 17 decorative panels for the dining room of the Château de Domecy-sur-le-Vault near Sermizelles in Burgundy. Redon had created large decorative works for private residences in the past, but his compositions for the château de Domecy in 1900-1901 were his most radical compositions to that point and mark the transition from ornamental to abstract painting. The landscape details do not show a specific place or space. Only details of trees, twigs with leaves, and budding flowers in an endless horizon can be seen. The colors used are mostly yellow, grey, brown and light blue. The influence of the Japanese painting style found on folding screens, , is discernible in his choice of colors and the rectangular proportions of most of the up to 2.5 metres high panels. Fifteen of them are located today in the Musée d'Orsay, acquired in 1988.

Domecy also commissioned Redon to paint portraits of his wife and their daughter Jeanne, two of which are in the collections of the Musée d'Orsay and the Getty Museum in California. Most of the paintings remained in the Domecy family collection until the 1960s.

The Night, c. 1910-1911, part of a series of decorative panels by Odilon Redon commissioned by Gustave Faret and located in the Fontfroide Abbey library[21][22]

In 1903, Redon was awarded the Legion of Honour.

His popularity increased when a catalogue of etchings and lithographs was published by André Mellerio in 1913; that same year, he was given the largest single representation at the groundbreaking US International Exhibition of Modern Art (aka Armory Show), in New York City, Chicago and Boston.

At 40, Redon married Camille Falte, a young Creole from Île Bourbon. They had a son, Arï Redon (30 April 1889 - 13 May 1972 in Paris). A visual artist himself, and subject of his father's portraiture as a child, Arï's partner was Suzanne Redon.

Redon died on 6 July 1916 in Paris.

His choice of color and subject matter in the second part of his career led to Redon being considered a precursor to Dadaism and Surrealism. According to Surrealist André Masson, Redon's use of bright colors in his flower pastels, as well as his choice of depicting uncommon or imaginary species renders his works "released from stylized naturalism", thus demonstrating the "endless possibilities of lyrical chromatics".

In 1923, Mellerio published Odilon Redon: Peintre Dessinateur et Graveur. An archive of Mellerio's papers is held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Modern exhibitions

In 2005, the Museum of Modern Art launched an exhibition entitled "Beyond The Visible", a comprehensive overview of Redon's work showcasing more than 100 paintings, drawings, prints and books from The Ian Woodner Family Collection. The exhibition ran from 30 October 2005 to 23 January 2006.

In 2007, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt presented the exhibition "As in a Dream" with a survey of Redon's work with more than 200 drawings, lithographs, pastels, and paintings.

The Grand Palais in Paris, France featured a vast exhibition of Redon's art from March to June 2011

The Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland showed a retrospective from February to May 2014.

The Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, The Netherlands, had an exhibition with an emphasis on the role that literature and music played in Redon's life and work, under the title La littérature et la musique. The exhibition ran from 2 June to 9 September 2018.

Butterflies, around 1910 (Museum of Modern Art)

During his early years as an artist, Redon's works were described as "a synthesis of nightmares and dreams", as they contained dark, fantastical figures from the artist's own imagination. His work represents an exploration of his internal feelings and psyche. Redon wanted to place "the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible". A telling source of Redon's inspiration and the forces behind his works can be found in his journal A Soi-même ( To Myself). Of his process he wrote:

I have often, as an exercise and as a sustenance, painted before an object down to the smallest accidents of its visual appearance; but the day left me sad and with an unsatiated thirst. The next day I let the other source run, that of imagination, through the recollection of the forms and I was then reassured and appeased.

Redon's drawings are characterized as mysterious and evocative by Joris-Karl Huysmans in the following passage from the novel (1884):

Those were the pictures bearing the signature: Odilon Redon. They held, between their gold-edged frames of unpolished pearwood, undreamed-of images: a Merovingian-type head, resting upon a cup; a bearded man, reminiscent both of a Buddhist priest and a public orator, touching an enormous cannon-ball with his finger; a spider with a human face lodged in the centre of its body. Then there were charcoal sketches which delved even deeper into the terrors of fever-ridden dreams. Here, on an enormous die, a melancholy eyelid winked; over there stretched dry and arid landscapes, calcinated plains, heaving and quaking ground, where volcanos erupted into rebellious clouds, under foul and murky skies; sometimes the subjects seemed to have been taken from the nightmarish dreams of science, and hark back to prehistoric times; monstrous flora bloomed on the rocks; everywhere, in among the erratic blocks and glacial mud, were figures whose simian appearance-heavy jawbone, protruding brows, receding forehead, and flattened skull top-recalled the ancestral head, the head of the first Quaternary Period, the head of man when he was still fructivorous and without speech, the contemporary of the mammoth, of the rhinoceros with septate nostrils, and of the giant bear. These drawings defied classification; unheeding, for the most part, of the limitations of painting, they ushered in a very special type of the fantastic, one born of sickness and delirium.

The art historian Michael Gibson says that Redon began to want his works, even the ones darker in colour and subject matter, to portray "the triumph of light over darkness."

Redon described his work as ambiguous and undefinable:

My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.

Redon was the inspiration for Guy Maddin's 1995 short film Odilon Redon, or The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity.

Andre Mellerio, Odilon Redon, 1968, ASIN B0007DNIKO

Odilon Redon and Alfred Werner, The Graphic Works of Odilon Redon, Dover, 1969, ISBN 0-486-21996-8

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Odilon Redon (born Bertrand Redon; French: ; 20 April 1840 - 6 July 1916) was a French Symbolist artist. Early in his career, both before and after fighting in the Franco-Prussian War, Redon worked almost exclusively in charcoal and lithography, works known as his noirs.

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John Singer Sargent (; January 12, 1856 - April 14, 1925) was an American expatriate artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian-era luxury. He created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings. His oeuvre documents worldwide travel, from Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, Spain, the Middle East, Montana, Maine, and Florida.

Born in Florence to American parents, he was trained in Paris before moving to London, living most of his life in Europe. He enjoyed international acclaim as a portrait painter. An early submission to the Paris Salon in the 1880s, his Portrait of Madame X, was intended to consolidate his position as a society painter in Paris, but instead resulted in scandal. During the next year following the scandal, Sargent departed for England where he continued a successful career as a portrait artist.

From the beginning, Sargent's work is characterized by remarkable technical facility, particularly in his ability to draw with a brush, which in later years inspired admiration as well as criticism for a supposed superficiality. His commissioned works were consistent with the grand manner of portraiture, while his informal studies and landscape paintings displayed a familiarity with Impressionism. In later life Sargent expressed ambivalence about the restrictions of formal portrait work, and devoted much of his energy to mural painting and working en plein air. Art historians generally ignored society artists such as Sargent until the late 20th century.

The exhibition in the 1980s of Sargent's previously hidden male nudes served to spark a re-evaluation of his life and work, and its psychological complexity. In addition to the beauty, sensation, and innovation of his oeuvre, his same-sex interests, unconventional friendships with women, and engagement with race, gender-nonconformity, and emerging globalism, are now viewed as socially and aesthetically progressive, and radical.

Sargent was a descendant of Epes Sargent, a colonial military leader and jurist. Before John Singer Sargent's birth, his father, FitzWilliam (b. 1820 in Gloucester, Massachusetts), was an eye surgeon at the Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia from 1844 to 1854. After John's older sister died at the age of two, his mother, Mary Newbold Singer (née Singer, 1826-1906), suffered a breakdown, and the couple decided to go abroad to recover. They remained nomadic expatriates for the rest of their lives. Although based in Paris, Sargent's parents moved regularly, spending seasons at the sea and at mountain resorts in France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland.

While Mary was pregnant, they stopped in Florence, Tuscany, because of a cholera epidemic. Sargent was born there in 1856. A year later, his sister Mary was born. After her birth, FitzWilliam reluctantly resigned his post in Philadelphia and accepted his wife's request to remain abroad. They lived modestly on a small inheritance and savings, leading a quiet life with their children. They generally avoided society and other Americans except for friends in the art world. Four more children were born abroad, of whom only two lived past childhood.

Although his father was a patient teacher of basic subjects, young Sargent was a rambunctious child, more interested in outdoor activities than his studies. As his father wrote home, "He is quite a close observer of animated nature." His mother was convinced that traveling around Europe, and visiting museums and churches, would give young Sargent a satisfactory education. Several attempts to have him formally schooled failed, owing mostly to their itinerant life. His mother was a capable amateur artist and his father was a skilled medical illustrator. Early on, she gave him sketchbooks and encouraged drawing excursions. Sargent worked on his drawings, and he enthusiastically copied images from The Illustrated London News of ships and made detailed sketches of landscapes. FitzWilliam had hoped that his son's interest in ships and the sea might lead him toward a naval career.

At thirteen, his mother reported that John "sketches quite nicely, & has a remarkably quick and correct eye. If we could afford to give him really good lessons, he would soon be quite a little artist." At the age of thirteen, he received some watercolor lessons from Carl Welsch, a German landscape painter. Although his education was far from complete, Sargent grew up to be a highly literate and cosmopolitan young man, accomplished in art, music, and literature. He was fluent in English, French, Italian, and German. At seventeen, Sargent was described as "willful, curious, determined and strong" (after his mother) yet shy, generous, and modest (after his father). He was well-acquainted with many of the great masters from first-hand observation, as he wrote in 1874, "I have learned in Venice to admire Tintoretto immensely and to consider him perhaps second only to Michelangelo and Titian."

An attempt to study at the Academy of Florence failed, as the school was reorganizing at the time. After returning to Paris from Florence, Sargent began his art studies with the young French portraitist Carolus-Duran. Following a meteoric rise, the artist was noted for his bold technique and modern teaching methods; his influence would be pivotal to Sargent during the period from 1874 to 1878.

In 1874, Sargent passed on his first attempt the rigorous exam required to gain admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, the premier art school in France. He took drawing classes, which included anatomy and perspective, and gained a silver prize. He also spent much time in self-study, drawing in museums and painting in a studio he shared with James Carroll Beckwith. He became both a valuable friend and Sargent's primary connection with the American artists abroad. Sargent also took some lessons from Léon Bonnat.

Fanny Watts, Sargent's childhood friend. The first painting at Paris Salon, 1877, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Carolus-Duran's atelier was progressive, dispensing with the traditional academic approach, which required careful drawing and underpainting, in favor of the method of working directly on the canvas with a loaded brush, derived from Diego Velázquez. It was an approach that relied on the proper placement of tones of paint. Sargent would later create a painting in this style that prompted comments such as: "The student has surpassed the teacher."

This approach also permitted spontaneous flourishes of color not bound to an underdrawing. It was markedly different from the traditional atelier of Jean-Léon Gérôme, where Americans Thomas Eakins and Julian Alden Weir had studied. Sargent was the star student in short order. Weir met Sargent in 1874 and noted that Sargent was "one of the most talented fellows I have ever come across; his drawings are like the old masters, and his color is equally fine." Sargent's excellent command of French and his superior talent made him both popular and admired. Through his friendship with Paul César Helleu, Sargent would meet giants of the art world, including Degas, Rodin, Monet, and Whistler.

Sargent's early enthusiasm was for landscapes, not portraiture, as evidenced by his voluminous sketches full of mountains, seascapes, and buildings. Carolus-Duran's expertise in portraiture finally influenced Sargent in that direction. Commissions for history paintings were still considered more prestigious, but were much harder to get. Portrait painting, on the other hand, was the best way of promoting an art career, getting exhibited in the Salon, and gaining commissions to earn a livelihood.

Sargent's first major portrait was of his friend Fanny Watts in 1877, and was also his first Salon admission. Its particularly well-executed pose drew attention. His second salon entry was the Oyster Gatherers of Cançale, an impressionistic painting of which he made two copies, one of which he sent back to the United States, and both received warm reviews.

In 1879, at the age of 23, Sargent painted a portrait of teacher Carolus-Duran; the virtuoso effort met with public approval and announced the direction his mature work would take. Its showing at the Paris Salon was both a tribute to his teacher and an advertisement for portrait commissions. Of Sargent's early work, Henry James wrote that the artist offered "the slightly 'uncanny' spectacle of a talent which on the very threshold of its career has nothing more to learn."

After leaving Carolus-Duran's atelier, Sargent visited Spain. There he studied the paintings of Velázquez with a passion, absorbing the master's technique, and in his travels gathered ideas for future works. He was entranced with Spanish music and dance. The trip also re-awakened his own talent for music (which was nearly equal to his artistic talent), and which found visual expression in his early masterpiece (1882). Music would continue to play a major part in his social life as well, as he was a skillful accompanist of both amateur and professional musicians. Sargent became a strong advocate for modern composers, especially Gabriel Fauré. Trips to Italy provided sketches and ideas for several Venetian street-scene genre paintings, which effectively captured gestures and postures he would find useful in later portraiture.

Upon his return to Paris, Sargent quickly received several portrait commissions. His career was launched. He immediately demonstrated the concentration and stamina that enabled him to paint with workman-like steadiness for the next twenty-five years. He filled in the gaps between commissions with many non-commissioned portraits of friends and colleagues. His fine manners, perfect French, and great skill made him a standout among the newer portraitists, and his fame quickly spread. He confidently set high prices and turned down unsatisfactory sitters. He mentored his friend Emil Fuchs who was learning to paint portraits in oils.

Nineteenth-century portraits

John Singer Sargent in his studio with Portrait of Madame X, c. 1885

In the early 1880s, Sargent regularly exhibited portraits at the Salon, and these were mostly full-length portrayals of women, such as Madame Edouard Pailleron (1880) (done en plein-air) and Madame Ramón Subercaseaux (1881). He continued to receive positive critical notice.

Sargent's best portraits reveal the individuality and personality of the sitters; his most ardent admirers think he is matched in this only by Velázquez, who was one of Sargent's great influences. The Spanish master's spell is apparent in Sargent's The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882, a haunting interior that echoes Velázquez's Las Meninas. As in many of his early portraits, Sargent confidently tries different approaches with each new challenge, here employing both unusual composition and lighting to striking effect. One of his most widely exhibited and best loved works of the 1880s was The Lady with the Rose (1882), a portrait of Charlotte Burckhardt, a close friend and possible romantic attachment.

Portrait of Madame X 1884

His most controversial work, Portrait of Madame X ( Madame Pierre Gautreau) (1884) is now considered one of his best works, and was the artist's personal favorite; he stated in 1915, "I suppose it is the best thing I have done." When unveiled in Paris at the 1884 Salon, it aroused such a negative reaction that it likely prompted Sargent's move to London. Sargent's self-confidence had led him to attempt a risque experiment in portraiture-but this time it unexpectedly backfired. The painting was not commissioned by her, and he pursued her for the opportunity, quite unlike most of his portrait work where clients sought him out. Sargent wrote to a common acquaintance:

I have a great desire to paint her portrait and have reason to think she would allow it and is waiting for someone to propose this homage to her beauty. ...you might tell her that I am a man of prodigious talent.

It took well over a year to complete the painting. The first version of the portrait of Madame Gautreau, with the famously plunging neckline, white-powdered skin, and arrogantly cocked head, featured an intentionally suggestive off-the-shoulder dress strap, on her right side only, which made the overall effect more daring and sensual. Sargent repainted the strap to its expected over-the-shoulder position to try to dampen the furor, but the damage had been done. French commissions dried up and he told his friend Edmund Gosse in 1885 that he contemplated giving up painting for music or business.

Writing of the reaction of visitors, Judith Gautier observed:

Is it a woman? a chimera, the figure of a unicorn rearing as on a heraldic coat of arms or perhaps the work of some oriental decorative artist to whom the human form is forbidden and who, wishing to be reminded of woman, has drawn the delicious arabesque? No, it is none of these things, but rather the precise image of a modern woman scrupulously drawn by a painter who is a master of his art."

Prior to the Madame X scandal of 1884, Sargent had painted exotic beauties such as Rosina Ferrara of Capri, and the Spanish expatriate model Carmela Bertagna, but the earlier pictures had not been intended for broad public reception. Sargent kept the painting prominently displayed in his London studio until he sold it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1916 after moving to the United States, and a few months after Gautreau's death.

Before arriving in England, Sargent began sending paintings for exhibition at the Royal Academy. These included the portraits of Dr. Pozzi at Home (1881), a flamboyant essay in red and his first full-length male portrait, and the more traditional Mrs. Henry White (1883). The ensuing portrait commissions encouraged Sargent to complete his move to London in 1886, where he settled in the artistic community of Chelsea. Notwithstanding the Madame X scandal, he had considered moving to London as early as 1882; he had been urged to do so repeatedly by his new friend, the novelist Henry James. In retrospect his transfer to London may be seen to have been inevitable.

English critics were not warm at first, faulting Sargent for his "clever" "Frenchified" handling of paint. One reviewer seeing his portrait of Mrs. Henry White described his technique as "hard" and "almost metallic" with "no taste in expression, air, or modeling." With help from Mrs. White, however, Sargent soon gained the admiration of English patrons and critics. Henry James also gave the artist "a push to the best of my ability."

Sargent spent much time painting outdoors in the English countryside when not in his studio. On a visit to Monet at Giverny in 1885, Sargent painted one of his most Impressionistic portraits, of Monet at work painting outdoors with his new bride nearby. Sargent is usually not thought of as an Impressionist painter, but he sometimes used impressionistic techniques to great effect. His Claude Monet Painting at the Edge of a Wood is rendered in his own version of the Impressionist style. In the 1880s, he attended the Impressionist exhibitions and he began to paint outdoors in the manner after that visit to Monet. Sargent purchased four Monet works for his personal collection during that time.

Sargent was similarly inspired to do a portrait of his artist friend Paul César Helleu, also painting outdoors with his wife by his side. A photograph very similar to the painting suggests that Sargent occasionally used photography as an aid to composition. Through Helleu, Sargent met and painted the famed French sculptor Auguste Rodin in 1884, a rather somber portrait reminiscent of works by Thomas Eakins. Although the British critics classified Sargent in the Impressionist camp, the French Impressionists thought otherwise. As Monet later stated, "He is not an Impressionist in the sense that we use the word, he is too much under the influence of Carolus-Duran."

Sargent's first major success at the Royal Academy came in 1887, with the enthusiastic response to Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, a large piece, painted on site, of two young girls lighting lanterns in an English garden in Broadway in the Cotswolds. The painting was immediately purchased by the Tate Gallery.

His first trip to New York and Boston as a professional artist in 1887-88 produced over 20 important commissions, including portraits of Isabella Stewart Gardner, the famed Boston art patron. His portrait of Mrs. Adrian Iselin, wife of a New York businessman, revealed her character in one of his most insightful works. In Boston, Sargent was honored with his first solo exhibition, which presented 22 of his paintings. Here he became friends with painter Dennis Miller Bunker, who traveled to England in the summer of 1888 to paint with him en plein air, and is the subject of Sargent's 1888 painting Dennis Miller Bunker Painting at Calcot.

Back in London, Sargent was quickly busy again. His working methods were by then well-established, following many of the steps employed by other master portrait painters before him. After securing a commission through negotiations which he carried out, Sargent would visit the client's home to see where the painting was to hang. He would often review a client's wardrobe to pick suitable attire. Some portraits were done in the client's home, but more often in his studio, which was well-stocked with furniture and background materials he chose for proper effect. He usually required eight to ten sittings from his clients, although he would try to capture the face in one sitting. He usually kept up pleasant conversation and sometimes he would take a break and play the piano for his sitter. Sargent seldom used pencil or oil sketches, and instead laid down oil paint directly. Finally, he would select an appropriate frame.

Sargent had no assistants; he handled all the tasks, such as preparing his canvases, varnishing the painting, arranging for photography, shipping, and documentation. He commanded about $5,000 per portrait, or about $130,000 in current dollars. Some American clients traveled to London at their own expense to have Sargent paint their portrait. The range of pigments regularly used by Sargent was: "Mars yellow (a synthetic iron oxide) and cadmium yellow; viridian and emerald green, sometimes mixed; vermillion and Mars red, both alone and mixed; madder; synthetic ultramarine or cobalt blue; and ivory black, sienna and Mars brown".

Morning Walk, 1888, private collection

Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, 1889

Around 1890, Sargent painted two daring non-commissioned portraits as show pieces-one of actress Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth and one of the popular Spanish dancer La Carmencita. Sargent was elected an associate of the Royal Academy, and was made a full member three years later. In the 1890s, he averaged fourteen portrait commissions per year, none more beautiful than the genteel Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, 1892. His portrait of Mrs. Hugh Hammersley (Mrs. Hugh Hammersley, 1892) was equally well received for its lively depiction of one of London's most notable hostesses. As a portrait painter in the grand manner, Sargent had unmatched success; he portrayed subjects who were at once ennobled and often possessed of nervous energy. Sargent was referred to as "the Van Dyck of our times." Although Sargent was an American expatriate, he returned to the United States many times, often to answer the demand for commissioned portraits.

Sargent exhibited nine of his portraits in the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and his Wife (1885)

Portrait of Metropolitan Museum of Art president Henry Gurdon Marquand (1896)

Sargent painted a series of three portraits of Robert Louis Stevenson. The second, Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and his Wife (1885), was one of his best known. He also completed portraits of two U.S. presidents: Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

In 1896, the Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned Sargent to produce a portrait of Henry Gurdon Marquand. Marquand served as the second president of the museum, and was instrumental in its founding.

Asher Wertheimer, a wealthy Jewish art dealer living in London, commissioned from Sargent a series of a dozen portraits of his family, the artist's largest commission from a single patron. The Wertheimer portraits reveal a pleasant familiarity between the artist and his subjects. Wertheimer bequeathed most of the paintings to the National Gallery. In 1888, Sargent released his portrait of Alice Vanderbilt Shepard, great-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Many of his most important works are in museums in the United States. In 1897, a friend sponsored a famous portrait in oil of Mr. and Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes, by Sargent, as a wedding gift.

Twentieth century portraits

John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Angela McInnes, 1915. Charcoal on paper.

Sargent emphasized Almina Wertheimer's exotic beauty in 1908 by dressing her en turquerie.

Repose, 1911

By 1900, Sargent was at the height of his fame. Cartoonist Max Beerbohm completed one of his seventeen caricatures of Sargent, making well known to the public the artist's paunchy physique. Although only in his forties, Sargent began to travel more and to devote relatively less time to portrait painting. His An Interior in Venice (1900), a portrait of four members of the Curtis family in their elegant palatial home, Palazzo Barbaro, was a resounding success. But, Whistler did not approve of the looseness of Sargent's brushwork, which he summed up as "smudge everywhere." One of Sargent's last major portraits in his bravura style was that of Lord Ribblesdale, in 1902, finely attired in an elegant hunting uniform. Between 1900 and 1907, Sargent continued his high productivity, which included, in addition to dozens of oil portraits, hundreds of portrait drawings at about $400 each. In 1901, he purchased the next door property to his home in Tite Street, to create a larger studio.

In 1907, at the age of fifty-one, Sargent officially closed his studio. Relieved, he stated, "Painting a portrait would be quite amusing if one were not forced to talk while working.... What a nuisance having to entertain the sitter and to look happy when one feels wretched." In that same year, Sargent painted his modest and serious self-portrait, his last, for the celebrated self-portrait collection of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.

Sargent made several summer visits to the Swiss Alps with his sisters Emily Sargent an accomplished painter in her own right, and Violet (Mrs Ormond) and Violet's daughters Rose-Marie and Reine, who were the subject of a number of paintings 1906-1913.

As Sargent wearied of portraiture he pursued architectural and landscapes subjects. During a visit to Rome in 1906 Sargent made an oil painting and several pencil sketches of the exterior staircase and balustrade in front of the Church of Saints Dominic and Sixtus, now the church of the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum. The double staircase built in 1654 is the design of architect and sculptor Orazio Torriani (fl.1602-1657). In 1907 he wrote: "I did in Rome a study of a magnificent curved staircase and balustrade, leading to a grand facade that would reduce a millionaire to a worm...." The painting now hangs at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University and the pencil sketches are in the collection of the Harvard University art collection of the Fogg Museum. Sargent later used the architectural features of this stair and balustrade in a portrait of Charles William Eliot, President of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909.

Sargent's fame was still considerable and museums eagerly bought his works. That year he declined a knighthood and decided instead to keep his American citizenship. From 1907 on, Sargent largely forsook portrait painting and focused on landscapes. He made numerous visits to the United States in the last decade of his life, including a stay of two full years from 1915 to 1917. In April 1917 Sargent was visiting the Miami estate of James Deering and was invited to cruise the Florida Keys with James and his brother Charles Deering aboard James' yacht Nepenthe. Sargent was much more interested in the "mine of sketching" that was the estate, not at all interested in fishing, and made the cruise "reluctantly," doing some watercolor sketches (including Derelicts, 1917).

By the time Sargent finished his portrait of John D. Rockefeller in 1917, most critics began to consign him to the masters of the past, "a brilliant ambassador between his patrons and posterity." Modernists treated him more harshly, considering him completely out of touch with the reality of American life and with emerging artistic trends including Cubism and Futurism. Sargent quietly accepted the criticism, but refused to alter his negative opinions of modern art. He retorted, "Ingres, Raphael and El Greco, these are now my admirations, these are what I like." In 1925, shortly before he died, Sargent painted his last oil portrait, a canvas of Grace Curzon, Marchioness Curzon of Kedleston. The painting was purchased in 1936 by the Currier Museum of Art, where it is on display.

Watercolors

Gondoliers' Siesta, c. 1904, watercolor

During Sargent's long career, he painted more than 2,000 watercolors, roving from the English countryside to Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, the Middle East, Montana, Maine, and Florida. Each destination offered pictorial stimulation and treasure. Even at his leisure, in escaping the pressures of the portrait studio, he painted with restless intensity, often painting from morning until night.

His hundreds of watercolors of Venice are especially notable, many done from the perspective of a gondola. His colors were sometimes extremely vivid and as one reviewer noted, "Everything is given with the intensity of a dream." In the Middle East and North Africa Sargent painted Bedouins, goatherds, and fishermen. In the last decade of his life, he produced many watercolors in Maine, Florida, and in the American West, of fauna, flora, and native peoples.

Muddy Alligators, 1917, watercolor

With his watercolors, Sargent was able to indulge his earliest artistic inclinations for nature, architecture, exotic peoples, and noble mountain landscapes. And it is in some of his late works where one senses Sargent painting most purely for himself. His watercolors were executed with a joyful fluidness. He also painted extensively family, friends, gardens, and fountains. In watercolors, he playfully portrayed his friends and family dressed in Orientalist costume, relaxing in brightly lit landscapes that allowed for a more vivid palette and experimental handling than did his commissions ( The Chess Game, 1906). His first major solo exhibit of watercolor works was at the Carfax Gallery in London in 1905. In 1909, he exhibited eighty-six watercolors in New York City, eighty-three of which were bought by the Brooklyn Museum. Evan Charteris wrote in 1927:

To live with Sargent's water-colours is to live with sunshine captured and held, with the luster of a bright and legible world, 'the refluent shade' and 'the Ambient ardours of the noon.'

Although not generally accorded the critical respect given Winslow Homer, perhaps America's greatest watercolorist, scholarship has revealed that Sargent was fluent in the entire range of opaque and transparent watercolor technique, including the methods used by Homer.

Theodore Roosevelt, 1903. Sargent had Roosevelt hold his pose when he turned around with impatience to address the artist while they were walking around the White House surveying possible locations for the portrait.[87]

As a concession to the insatiable demand of wealthy patrons for portraits, Sargent dashed off hundreds of rapid charcoal portrait sketches, which he called "Mugs". Forty-six of these, spanning the years 1890-1916, were exhibited at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in 1916.

All of Sargent's murals are to be found in the Boston/Cambridge area. They are in the Boston Public Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, and Harvard's Widener Library. Sargent's largest scale works are the mural decorations Triumph of Religion that grace the Boston Public Library, depicting the history of religion and the gods of polytheism. They were attached to the walls of the library by means of marouflage. He worked on the cycle for almost thirty years but never completed the final mural. Sargent drew on his extensive travels and museum visits to create a dense art historical mélange. The murals were most recently restored in 2003-2004 by a team from the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Harvard Art Museums.

"Religions of the World: The Sargent Decoration in the Staircase Hall", Boston Public Library, 1896 illustration by Ernest Peixotto

Sargent worked on the murals from 1895 through 1919; they were intended to show religion's (and society's) progress from pagan superstition up through the ascension of Christianity, concluding with a painting depicting Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount. But Sargent's paintings of "The Church" and " The Synagogue", installed in late 1919, inspired a debate about whether the artist had represented Judaism in a stereotypical, or even an anti-Semitic, manner. Drawing upon iconography that was used in medieval paintings, Sargent portrayed Judaism and the synagogue as a blind, ugly hag, and Christianity and the church as a lovely, radiant young woman. He also failed to understand how these representations might be problematic for the Jews of Boston; he was both surprised and hurt when the paintings were criticized. The paintings were objectionable to Boston Jews since they seemed to show Judaism defeated, and Christianity triumphant. The Boston newspapers also followed the controversy, noting that while many found the paintings offensive, not everyone agreed. In the end, Sargent abandoned his plan to finish the murals, and the controversy eventually died down.

Upon his return to England in 1918 after a visit to the United States, Sargent was commissioned as a war artist by the British Ministry of Information. In his large painting and in many watercolors, he depicted scenes from the Great War. Sargent had been affected by the death of his niece Rose-Marie in the shelling of the St Gervais church, Paris, on Good Friday 1918.

Sargent was a lifelong bachelor with a wide circle of friends including both men and women such as Oscar Wilde (with whom he was neighbors for several years), lesbian author Violet Paget, and his likely lover Albert de Belleroche. Biographers once portrayed him as staid and reticent. However, recent scholarship has theorised he was a private, complex, and passionate man whose homosexual identity was integral to shaping his art. This view is based on statements by his friends and associates, the overall alluring remoteness of his portraits, the way his works challenge 19th-century notions of gender difference, his previously ignored male nudes, and some nude male portraits, including those of Thomas E. McKeller, Bartholomy Maganosco, Olimpio Fusco, and that of aristocratic artist Albert de Belleroche, which hung in his Chelsea dining room. Sargent had a long friendship with Belleroche, whom he met in 1882 and traveled with frequently. A surviving drawing suggests Sargent might have used him as a model for Madame X, following a coincidence of dates for Sargent drawing each of them separately around the same time, and the delicate pose suggestive more of Sargent's sketches of the male form than his often stiff commissions.

It has been suggested that Sargent's reputation in the 1890s as "the painter of the Jews" may have been due to his empathy with, and complicit enjoyment of, their mutual social otherness. One such Jewish client, Betty Wertheimer, wrote that when in Venice, Sargent "was only interested in the Venetian gondoliers". The painter Jacques-Émile Blanche, who was one of his early sitters, said after Sargent's death that his sex life "was notorious in Paris, and in Venice, positively scandalous. He was a frenzied bugger."

There were many relationships with women: it has been suggested that those with his sitters Rosina Ferrara, Virginie Gautreau, and Judith Gautier may have tipped into infatuation. As a young man, Sargent also courted for a time Louise Burkhardt, the model for Lady with the Rose.

Sargent's friends and supporters included Henry James, Isabella Stewart Gardner (who commissioned and purchased works from Sargent and sought his advice on other acquisitions), Edward VII, and Paul César Helleu. His associations also included Prince Edmond de Polignac and Count Robert de Montesquiou. Other artists Sargent associated with were Dennis Miller Bunker, James Carroll Beckwith, Edwin Austin Abbey, and John Elliott (who also worked on the Boston Public Library murals), Francis David Millet, Joaquín Sorolla, and Claude Monet, whom Sargent painted. Between 1905 and 1914, Sargent's frequent traveling companions were the married artist couple Wilfrid de Glehn and Jane Emmet de Glehn. The trio would often spend summers in France, Spain, or Italy, and all three would depict one another in their paintings during their travels.

Arsène Vigeant, 1885, Musées de Metz

In a time when the art world focused, in turn, on Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism, Sargent practiced his own form of Realism, which made brilliant references to Velázquez, Van Dyck, and Gainsborough. His seemingly effortless facility for paraphrasing the masters in a contemporary fashion led to a stream of commissioned portraits of remarkable virtuosity (Arsène Vigeant, 1885, Musées de Metz; Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Newton Phelps-Stokes, 1897, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and earned Sargent the moniker, "the Van Dyck of our times."

Still, during his life his work engendered negative responses from some of his colleagues: Camille Pissarro wrote "he is not an enthusiast but rather an adroit performer," and Walter Sickert published a satirical turn under the heading "Sargentolatry." By the time of his death he was dismissed as an anachronism, a relic of the Gilded Age and out of step with the artistic sentiments of post-World War I Europe. Elizabeth Prettejohn suggests that the decline of Sargent's reputation was due partly to the rise of anti-Semitism, and the resultant intolerance of 'celebrations of Jewish prosperity.' It has been suggested that the exotic qualities inherent in his work appealed to the sympathies of the Jewish clients whom he painted from the 1890s on.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in his portrait Almina, Daughter of Asher Wertheimer (1908), in which the subject is seen wearing a Persian costume, a pearl encrusted turban, and strumming an Indian tambura, accoutrements all meant to convey sensuality and mystery. If Sargent used this portrait to explore issues of sexuality and identity, it seems to have met with the satisfaction of the subject's father, Asher Wertheimer, a wealthy Jewish art dealer.

Foremost of Sargent's detractors was the influential English art critic Roger Fry, of the Bloomsbury Group, who at the 1926 Sargent retrospective in London dismissed Sargent's work as lacking aesthetic quality: "Wonderful indeed, but most wonderful that this wonderful performance should ever have been confused with that of an artist." And, in the 1930s, Lewis Mumford led a chorus of the severest critics: "Sargent remained to the end an illustrator ... the most adroit appearance of workmanship, the most dashing eye for effect, cannot conceal the essential emptiness of Sargent's mind, or the contemptuous and cynical superficiality of a certain part of his execution."

Part of Sargent's devaluation is also attributed to his expatriate life, which made him seem less American at a time when "authentic" socially conscious American art, as exemplified by the Stieglitz circle and by the Ashcan School, was on the ascent.

After such a long period of critical disfavor, Sargent's reputation has increased steadily since the 1950s. In the 1960s, a revival of Victorian art and new scholarship directed at Sargent strengthened his reputation. Sargent has been the subject of large-scale exhibitions in major museums, including a retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1986 and a major 1999 traveling show that exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Gallery of Art Washington, and the National Gallery, London. In 2022, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and in 2023 the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, California, hosted an exhibition of Sargent's paintings from Spain.

In 1986, Andy Warhol commented to Sargent scholar Trevor Fairbrother that Sargent "made everybody look glamorous. Taller. Thinner. But they all have mood, every one of them has a different mood." In a TIME magazine article from the 1980s, critic Robert Hughes praised Sargent as " the unrivaled recorder of male power and female beauty in a day that, like ours, paid excessive court to both."

Sargent's grave in Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey

In 1922, Sargent co-founded New York City's Grand Central Art Galleries together with Edmund Greacen, Walter Leighton Clark, and others. Sargent actively participated in the Grand Central Art Galleries and their academy, the Grand Central School of Art, until his death in 1925. The Galleries held a major retrospective exhibit of Sargent's work in 1924. He then returned to England, where he died at his Chelsea home on April 14, 1925, of heart disease. Sargent is interred in Brookwood Cemetery near Woking, Surrey.

Memorial exhibitions of Sargent's work were held in Boston in 1925, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the Royal Academy and Tate Gallery in London in 1926. The Grand Central Art Galleries also organized a posthumous exhibition in 1928 of previously unseen sketches and drawings from throughout his career.

Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and his Wife was sold in 2004 for US$8.8 million and is located at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art at Bentonville, Arkansas.

In December 2004, Group with Parasols (A Siesta) (1905) sold for US$23.5 million, nearly double the Sotheby's estimate of $12 million. The previous highest price for a Sargent painting was US$11 million.

In 2018, Comedy Central star Jade Esteban Estrada wrote, directed and starred in Madame X: A Burlesque Fantasy, a story based on the life of Sargent and his famous painting, Portrait of Madame X.

The works of Sargent feature prominently in Maggie Stiefvater's 2021 novel Mister Impossible.

Charteris, Evan. John Sargent with reproductions from his paintings and drawings. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927

Joselit, Jenna Weissman. "Restoring the American 'Sistine Chapel'". The Forward, August 13, 2010.

Khandekar, Narayan; Pocobene, Gianfranco; Smith, Kate (eds.). John Singer Sargent's Triumph of Religion at the Boston Public Library: Creation and Restoration. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Art Museum; New Haven, Conn.: Distributed by Yale University Press, 2009. ISBN 9780300122909

Kilmurray, Elaine: Sargent Abroad Archived November 7, 2016, at the Wayback Machine. Abbeville Press, 1997, pp. 57-8, 242.

Lehmann-Barclay, Lucie. "Public Art, Private Prejudice." Christian Science Monitor, January 7, 2005, p. 11.

"New Painting at Boston Public Library Stirs Jews to Vigorous Protest." Boston Globe, November 9, 1919, p. 48.

Noël, Benoît et Jean Hournon: Portrait de Madame X in Parisiana - la Capitale des arts au XIXème siècle, Les Presses Franciliennes, Paris, 2006. pp. 100-105.

Ormond, Richard: "Sargent's Art" in John Singer Sargent, pp. 25-7. Tate Gallery, 1998.

Prettejohn, Elizabeth: Interpreting Sargent. Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1998, p. 9.

Rewald, John: Camille Pissarro: Letters to his Son Lucien, p. 183. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.

Adelson, Warren; Gerdts, William H.; Kilmurray, Elaine; Zorzi, Rosella Mamoli; Ormond, Richard; Oustinoff, Elizabeth (2006). Sargent's Venice. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-11717-2.

Cash, Sarah; Heller, Nancy G.; Kilmurray, Elaine; Ormond, Richard; Barón, Javier; Sharpe, Chloe; Southwick, Catherine (2022). Sargent and Spain. Washington: National Gallery of Art with Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300266467.

Herdrich, Stephanie L.; Weinberg, H. Barbara (2000). American Drawings and Watercolors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: John Singer Sargent. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-87099-952-4.

Mount, Charles Merrill (1955). John Singer Sargent. New York: W. W. Norton.

Ratcliff, Carter (1982). John Singer Sargent. New York: Abbeville Press. ISBN 0-89659-673-7.

Rubin, Stephen D. (1991). John Singer Sargent's Alpine Sketchbooks: A Young Artist's Perspective. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 978-0-300-19378-7.

113 artworks by or after John Singer Sargent at the Art UK site

Biography, Style and Artworks

John Singer Sargent - Gallery of 809 paintings.

"Mrs. Edward Goetz" at [Brigham Young Museum of Art]

John Singer Sargent Virtual Gallery

Sargent at Harvard - archived searchable database by Harvard University Art Museums

The Sargent Murals Archived June 2, 2005, at the Wayback Machine at Boston Public Library

John Singer Sargent - News, biography and works

John Singer Sargent, Miss M. Carey Thomas, July 1899, oil on canvas, Bryn Mawr College Art and Artifact Collections

John Singer Sargent Letters Online at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art Archived December 6, 2010, at the Wayback Machine

"Sargent and the Sea at the Royal Academy", review by Richard Dorment, The Guardian, July 12, 2010

John Singer Sargent at Harper's Magazine

John Singer Sargent at Smithsonian American Art Museum

John Singer Sargent exhibition catalogs

A video discussion about Sargent's Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose Archived October 7, 2014, at the Wayback Machine from Smarthistory at Khan Academy.

Artist John Singer Sargent's strong interest in framing

Works by John Singer Sargent at Project Gutenberg

Works by or about John Singer Sargent at Internet Archive

John Singer Sargent at the Jewish Museum

Joseph J. Rishel, In the Luxembourg Gardens in The John G. Johnson Collection: A History and Selected Works, a Philadelphia Museum of Art digital scholarly catalogue (fully available as a free PDF)

John Singer Sargent: Secrets of Composition and Design

Sargent and Spain, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., October 2, 2022 - January 2, 2023

Sargent and Spain, Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA, February 11 - May 14, 2023

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John Singer Sargent (; January 12, 1856 - April 14, 1925) was an American expatriate artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian-era luxury. He created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings.

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Gustav Klimt (14 July 1862 - 6 February 1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. Klimt is noted for his paintings, murals, sketches, and other objets d'art. Klimt's primary subject was the female body, and his works are marked by a frank eroticism. Amongst his figurative works, which include allegories and portraits, he painted landscapes. Among the artists of the Vienna Secession, Klimt was the most influenced by Japanese art and its methods.

Early in his career, he was a successful painter of architectural decorations in a conventional manner. As he began to develop a more personal style, his work was the subject of controversy that culminated when the paintings he completed around 1900 for the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna were criticized as pornographic. He subsequently accepted no more public commissions, but achieved a new success with the paintings of his "golden phase", many of which include gold leaf. Klimt's work was an important influence on his younger peer Egon Schiele.

Since the 1990s, he has been one of the artists whose paintings fetch top prices at auctions.

Gustav Klimt in 1887

Klimt in a light Blue Smock by Egon Schiele, 1913

Gustav Klimt was born in Baumgarten, near Vienna in the Austrian Empire, the second of seven children-three boys and four girls. His mother, Anna Klimt ( née Finster), had an unrealized ambition to be a musical performer. His father, Ernst Klimt the Elder, formerly from Bohemia, was a gold engraver. All three of their sons displayed artistic talent early on. Klimt's younger brothers were Ernst Klimt and Georg Klimt.

Klimt lived in poverty while attending the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule, a school of applied arts and crafts, now the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where he studied architectural painting from 1876 until 1883. He revered Vienna's 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 and by 1880 they had received numerous commissions as a team that they called the "Company of Artists". They also 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 Klimt's father and brother Ernst both died, and he had to assume financial responsibility for his father's and brother's families. The tragedies also affected his artistic vision and soon he would move towards a new personal style. Characteristic of his style at the end of the 19th century is the inclusion ofNuda Veritas ( naked truth) as a symbolic figure in some of his works, including Ancient Greece and Egypt (1891), Pallas Athene (1898) and Nuda Veritas (1899). Historians believe that Klimt with the nuda veritas denounced both the policy of the Habsburgs and Austrian society, which ignored all political and social problems of that time. In the early 1890s Klimt met Austrian fashion designer Emilie Louise Flöge (a sibling of his sister-in-law) who was to be his companion until the end of his life. His painting, The Kiss (1907-08), is thought to be an image of them as lovers which was painted five years after Klimt's 1902 full-length portrait of her. He designed many costumes that she produced and modeled in his works.

During this period Klimt fathered at least fourteen children.

A section of the Beethoven Frieze, at Secession Building, Vienna (1902)

Klimt became one of the founding members and president of the Wiener Secession in 1897 and of the group's periodical, ("Sacred Spring"). He remained with the Secession until 1908. The goals of the group were to provide exhibitions for unconventional young artists, to bring the works of the best foreign artists to Vienna, and to publish its own magazine to showcase the work of members. The group declared no manifesto and did not set out to encourage any particular style- Naturalists, Realists, and Symbolists all coexisted. The government supported their efforts and gave them a lease on public land to erect an exhibition hall. The group's symbol was Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of just causes, wisdom, and the arts-of whom Klimt painted his radical version in 1898.

Judith II (1909)

In 1894, Klimt was commissioned to create three paintings to decorate the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna. Not completed until the turn of the century, his three paintings, Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence were criticized for their radical themes and material, and were called " pornographic". Klimt had transformed traditional allegory and symbolism into a new language that was more overtly sexual and hence more disturbing to some. The public outcry came from all quarters-political, aesthetic and religious. As a result, the paintings (seen in gallery below) were not displayed on the ceiling of the Great Hall. This was to be the last public commission accepted by the artist. All three paintings were destroyed when retreating German forces burned Schloss Immendorf in May 1945, together with another ten paintings, including Schubert at the Piano, Girlfriends (or Two Women Friends), Wally (portrait),

His Nuda Veritas (1899) defined his bid to further "shake up" the establishment. The starkly naked red-headed woman holds the mirror of truth, while above her is a quotation by Friedrich Schiller in stylized lettering: "If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please only a few. To please many is bad." In 1902, animated by resentment Klimt wanted to title the painting Gold Fish (in which a naked woman ostentatiously and maliciously shows her butt), "To my critics", but was dissuaded by friends.

In 1902, Klimt finished the Beethoven Frieze for the Fourteenth Vienna Secessionist exhibition, which was intended to be a celebration of the composer and featured a monumental polychrome sculpture by Max Klinger. Intended for the exhibition only, the frieze was painted directly on the walls with light materials. After the exhibition the painting was preserved, although it was not displayed again until restored in 1986. The face on the Beethoven portrait resembled the composer and Vienna Court Opera director Gustav Mahler.

In 1905, dissensions within the Secession increased, and when the artistic consultant of the Galerie Mietkhe Carl Moll was attacked by colleagues of the Secession for his work, a strong controversy arose which created a real internal split, led by Klimt. The following year, Klimt formed the group called "Kunstschau" (Art Show) or "Klimt group", which also included Moll and Otto Wagner, among other important Austrian artists.

During this period Klimt did not confine himself to public commissions. Beginning in the late 1890s he took annual summer holidays with the Flöge family on the shores of Attersee and painted many of his landscapes there. These landscapes constitute the only genre aside from figure painting that seriously interested Klimt. In recognition of his intensity, the locals called him Waldschrat ("forest demon").

Klimt's Attersee paintings are of sufficient number and quality as to merit separate appreciation. Formally, the landscapes are characterized by the same refinement of design and emphatic patterning as the figural pieces. Deep space in the Attersee works is flattened so efficiently to a single plane that it is believed that Klimt painted them by using a telescope.

The Kiss 1907-08, oil on canvas, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna

From 1900 Gustav Klimt became famous above all as a "painter of women". He created about one large-format portrait of a woman per year, in which he applied the principles of Art Nouveau - flatness, decoration, gold leaf application. At the same time, he devoted himself to allegories and Old Testament heroines, which he transformed, however, into dangerous " femmes fatales". Eros, sexuality and femininity were variously interpreted by him as alluring danger. Life, love, and death can be determined as the important themes of Klimt's work. Klimt's 'Golden Phase' was marked by positive critical reaction and financial success. Many of his paintings from this period included gold leaf. Klimt had previously used gold in his Pallas Athene (1898) and (1901), although the works most popularly associated with this period are the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) and (1907-08).

Klimt traveled in all Europe, mainly to present his works on occasion of international exhibitions, but trips to Venice and Ravenna, both famous for their beautiful mosaics, most likely inspired his gold technique and his Byzantine imagery. In 1904, he collaborated with other artists on the lavish Stoclet Palace, the home of a wealthy Belgian industrialist that was one of the grandest monuments of the Art Nouveau age. Klimt's contributions to the dining room, including both Fulfillment and Expectation, were some of his finest decorative works, and as he publicly stated, "probably the ultimate stage of my development of ornament."

In 1905, Klimt painted The Three Ages of Woman, depicting the cycle of life. He created a painted portrait of Margarete Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein's sister, on the occasion of her marriage. Then, between 1907 and 1909, Klimt painted five canvases of society women wrapped in fur. His apparent love of costume is expressed in the many photographs of Flöge modeling clothing he had designed.

As he worked and relaxed in his home, Klimt normally wore sandals and a long robe with no undergarments. His simple life was somewhat cloistered, devoted to his art, family, and little else except the Secessionist Movement from which he and many colleagues eventually resigned. He avoided café society and seldom socialized with other artists. Klimt's fame usually brought patrons to his door and he could afford to be highly selective. His painting method was very deliberate and painstaking at times and he required lengthy sittings by his subjects. Although very active sexually, he kept his affairs discreet and he avoided personal scandal.

The artist cultivated close relationships with some of his clients, who were primarily from the assimilated Jewish Viennese Haute bourgeoisie. He cultivated intimate relationships especially with his models from upper class circles. He was considered progressive for his time, because he allowed women an active role in sexuality.

Klimt wrote little about his vision or his methods. He wrote mostly postcards to Flöge and kept no diary. In a rare writing called "Commentary on a non-existent self-portrait", he states "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."

In 1901 Hermann Bahr wrote, in his Speech on Klimt: "Just as only a lover can reveal to a man what life means to him and develop its innermost significance, I feel the same about these paintings."

Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), which sold for a record $135 million in 2006, Neue Galerie, New York

In 1911 his painting Death and Life received first prize in the world exhibitions in Rome. In 1915 Anna, his mother, died. Klimt died three years later in Vienna on 6 February 1918, having suffered a stroke and pneumonia brought about by the worldwide influenza epidemic of that year. He was buried at the Hietzinger Cemetery in Hietzing, Vienna. Numerous paintings by him were left unfinished.

Farm Garden with Sunflowers, 1907, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere[35]

Klimt often used decorative patterns in his paintings. Die Umarmung ("The Embrace", (c. 1905-1909) - detail from the Stoclet Palace in Brussels.

The only folio set produced in Klimt's lifetime, Das Werk Gustav Klimts, was published initially by H. O. Miethke (of Galerie Miethke, Klimt's exclusive gallery in Vienna) from 1908 to 1914 in an edition of 300, supervised personally by the artist. The first thirty-five editions (I-XXXV) each included an original drawing by Klimt, and the next thirty-five editions (XXXVI-LXX) each with a facsimile signature on the title page. Fifty images depicting Klimt's most important paintings (1893-1913) were reproduced using collotype lithography and mounted on a heavy, cream-colored wove paper with deckle edges. Thirty-one of the images (ten of which are multicolored) are printed on Chine-collé. The remaining nineteen are high quality halftones prints. Each piece was marked with a unique signet-designed by Klimt-which was impressed into the wove paper in gold metallic ink. The prints were issued in groups of ten to subscribers, in unbound black paper folders embossed with Klimt's name. Because of the delicate nature of collotype lithography, as well as the necessity for multicolored prints (a feat difficult to reproduce with collotypes), and Klimt's own desire for perfection, the series that was published in mid-1908 was not completed until 1914.

Each of the fifty prints was categorized among five themes:

1. Allegorical (which included multicolored prints of The Golden Knight, 1903 and The Virgin, c. 1912)

2. Erotic-Symbolist (Water Serpents I and Water Serpents II, both c. 1907-08 and The Kiss, c. 1908)

3. Landscapes (Farm Garden with Sunflowers, 1907)

4. Mythical or Biblical (Pallas Athena, 1898; Judith and The Head of Holofernes, 1901; and Danaë, c. 1908)

5. Portraits (Emilie Flöge, 1902)

The monochrome collotypes as well as the halftone works were printed with a variety of colored inks ranging from sepia to blue and green. Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria was the first to purchase a folio set of Das Werk Gustav Klimts in 1908.

Fünfundzwanzig Handzeichnungen

Fünfundzwanzig Handzeichnungen ("Twenty-five Drawings") was released the year after Klimt's death. Many of the drawings in the collection were erotic in nature and just as polarizing as his painted works. Published in Vienna in 1919 by Gilhofer & Ranschburg, the edition of 500 features twenty-five monochrome and two-color collotype reproductions, nearly indistinguishable from the original works. While the set was released a year after Klimt's death, some art historians suspect he was involved with production planning because of the meticulous nature of the printing (Klimt had overseen the production of the plates for Das Werk Gustav Klimts, making sure each one was to his exact specifications, a level of quality carried through similarly in Fünfundzwanzig Handzeichnungen). The first ten editions also each contained an original Klimt drawing.

Many of the works contained in this volume depict erotic scenes of nude women, some of whom are masturbating alone or are coupled in sapphic embraces. When a number of the original drawings were exhibited to the public, at Galerie Miethke in 1910 and the International Exhibition of Prints and Drawings in Vienna in 1913, they were met by critics and viewers who were hostile towards Klimt's contemporary perspective. There was an audience for Klimt's erotic drawings, however, and fifteen of his drawings were selected by Viennese poet Franz Blei for his translation of Hellenistic satirist Lucian's Dialogues of the Courtesans. The book, limited to 450 copies, provided Klimt with the opportunity to show these more lurid depictions of women and avoided censorship thanks to an audience composed of a small group of (mostly male) affluent patrons.

Gustav Klimt An Aftermath

Composed in 1931 by editor Max Eisler and printed by the Austrian State Printing Office, Gustav Klimt An Aftermath was intended to complete the lifetime folio Das Werk Gustav Klimts. The folio contains thirty colored collotypes (fourteen of which are multicolored) and follows a similar format found in Das Werk Gustav Klimts, replacing the unique Klimt-designed signets with gold-debossed plate numbers. One hundred and fifty sets were produced in English, with twenty of them (Nos. I-XX) presented as a "gala edition" bound in gilt leather. The set contains detailed images from previously released works (Hygeia from the University Mural Medicine, 1901; a section of the third University Mural Jurisprudence, 1903), as well as the unfinished paintings ( Adam and Eve, Bridal Progress).

In 1963, the Albertina museum in Vienna began researching the drawings of Gustav Klimt. The research project Gustav Klimt. Die Zeichnungen, has since been associated with intensive exhibition and publication activities.

Between 1980 and 1984 Alice Strobl published the three-volume catalogue raisonné, which records and describes all drawings by Gustav Klimt known at the time in chronological order. An additional supplementary volume was published in 1989. In the following year Strobl transferred her work to the art historian and curator Marian Bisanz-Prakken, who had assisted her since 1975 in the determination and classification of the works and who continues the research project to this day. Since 1990, Marian Bisanz-Prakken has redefined, documented, and scientifically processed around 400 further drawings.

This makes the Albertina Vienna the only institution in the world that has been examining and scientifically classifying the artist's works for half a century. The research project now includes information on over 4,300 works by Gustav Klimt.

Seated woman masturbating, 1913

Sonja Knips, 1898

Rosebushes under the Trees, c. 1905

Oberösterreichisches Bauernhaus, 1911

Lady with a Fan, c. 1917-18, Klimt's last painting

Klimt's reconstructed studio (2013) at the Klimt Villa. On display, copies of the paintings Woman with Fan and The Bride (both c. 1917-18)

Klimt's paintings have brought some of the highest prices recorded for individual works of art. In November 2003, Klimt's Landhaus am Attersee sold for $29,128,000, but that sale was soon eclipsed by prices paid for Willem de Kooning's Woman III and later Klimt's own Adele Bloch-Bauer II, the latter of which sold for $150 million in 2016. More frequently than paintings, however, the artist's works on paper can be found on the art market. The art market database Artprice lists 67 auction entries for paintings, but 1564 for drawings and watercolors. The most expensive drawing sold so far was "Reclining Female Nude Facing Left", which was made between 1914 and 1915 and sold in London in 2008 for £505,250. However, the majority of the art trade traditionally takes place privately through galleries such as Wienerroither & Kohlbacher, which specialize in the trade with original works by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele and regularly present these at monographic exhibitions and international art fairs.

In 2006, the 1907 portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, was purchased for the Neue Galerie New York by Ronald Lauder reportedly for US$135 million, surpassing Picasso's 1905 Boy With a Pipe (sold 5 May 2004 for $104 million), as the highest reported price ever paid for a painting up to that point.

On 7 August 2006, Christie's auction house announced it was handling the sale of the remaining four works by Klimt that were recovered by Maria Altmann and her co-heirs after their long legal battle against Austria (see Republic of Austria v. Altmann). Altmann's fight to regain her family's paintings has been the subject of a number of documentary films, including Adele's Wish. Her struggle also became the subject of the dramatic film the Woman in Gold, a movie inspired by Stealing Klimt, the documentary featuring Maria Altmann herself. The portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II was sold at auction in November 2006 for $88 million, the third-highest priced piece of art at auction at the time. The Apple Tree I (c. 1912) sold for $33 million, Birch Forest (1903) sold for $40.3 million, and Houses in Unterach on Lake Atter (1916) sold for $31 million. Collectively, the five restituted paintings netted more than $327 million. The painting Litzlberg am Attersee was auctioned for $40.4 million November 2011.

Klimt's last painting, Lady with a Fan ( Dame mit Fächer, 1918), is sold by Sotheby's in London on 27 June 2023 for UK£85.3M (US$108.4) to a Hong Kong collector, the highest-priced artwork ever sold at auction in Europe.

Gustav Klimt - Beech Grove I, 1902

According to the writer Frank Whitford: "Klimt of course, is an important artist-he's a very popular artist-but in terms of the history of art, he's a very unimportant artist. Although he sums up so much in his work, about the society in which he found himself-in art historical terms his effect was negligible. So he's an artist really in a cul-de-sac." Klimt's work had a strong influence on the paintings of Egon Schiele, with whom he would collaborate to found the Kunsthalle (Hall of Art) in 1917, to try to keep local artists from going abroad. Artists who reinterpreted Klimt's work include Slovak artist Rudolf Fila.[citation needed ]

Already during his lifetime Klimt influenced other artists, such as the Italian Liberty style artist Galileo Chini (1873-1956). Klimt was exhibited at the 1910 Venice Biennale. Chini and Vittorio Zecchin (1878-1947) created a number of panels in 1914 for the Venice Hotel Terminus called "La Primavera" and "Mille e una notte". These were later exhibited in the Boncompagni Ludovisi Decorative Art Museum.

In 1972, the Vienna State Opera presented a new production of , an opera by Oscar Wilde and Richard Strauss, in a Klimt inspired stage setting and costumes by Jürgen Rose. This production, directed by Boleslaw Barlog and first conducted by Karl Böhm, became extremely popular and stayed in the repertoire for nearly fifty years. It was shown in 265 performances and went on tour to Florence, Washington and twice to Japan.

In 2006, an Austrian art-house biographical film about his life was released starring John Malkovich as Klimt. In 2008, the Couturier John Galliano found inspiration for the Christian Dior Spring-Summer 2008 haute couture collection in Klimt's work. The 2019 collection of designer Alexander McQueen was partially inspired by Klimt.[citation needed ]

Several of Klimt's most famous works from his golden period inspired the title sequence for the animated adaptation of the manga series, , in which the art is recreated to fit with the series' own characters and is arranged as a montage with the song "Lilium". The opening to the anime Sound of the Sky also is largely inspired by Klimt's works, which was also directed by the same director as Elfen Lied. The design of the land of Centopia on the TV series is inspired by Klimt's works. The art of the video game Transistor also uses patterns and embellishments inspired by Klimt.

Gustav Klimt and his work have been the subjects of many collector coins and medals, such as the 100 Euro Painting Gold Coin, issued on 5 November 2003, by the Austrian Mint. The obverse depicts Klimt in his studio with two unfinished paintings on easels.

An early colour photo taken of Klimt using Autochrome technology, 1910s

Tawny Chatmon, an American photographic artist known for her portraits of Black children overlaid with gold leaf and paint, has sought to place Black figures in glittering gold clothing inspired by Klimt's lavish portraits of white Viennese women.

Elements of the portrait First Lady Michelle Obama, by Amy Sherald in 2018, have been noted by art critics to have been influenced by Klimt, in particular the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. One commentator noted the similarity to fashion designed by Klimt's muse Emilie Louise Flöge.

The city of Vienna, Austria had many special exhibitions commemorating the 150th anniversary of Klimt's birth in 2012.

Google commemorated Gustav Klimt with a Google doodle celebrating Klimt's painting on his 150th birthday, 14 July 2012.

In 2012, the Austrian Mint began a five-coin gold series to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Klimt's birth. The first 50 Euro gold coin was issued on 25 January 2012 and featured a portrait of Klimt on the obverse and a portion of his painting of Adele Bloch-Bauer.

In 2013, the Gustav Klimt Foundation was set up by Ursula Ucicky, widow of Klimt's illegitimate son Gustav Ucicky, with a mission to "preserve and disseminate Gustav Klimt's legacy." The managing director of the Leopold Museum, Peter Weinhäupl, was appointed as Chairman of the foundation. As a reaction, the museum's director Tobias G. Natter resigned in protest, citing Ucicky's past as a Nazi propaganda film-maker.

In 2000, a government committee recommended that Klimt's Lady with Hat and Feather Boa, in Belvedere Museum in Vienna, be restituted to the heirs of the Jewish family that had owned it before the Nazi Anschluss.

National Public Radio reported on 17 January 2006 that "The Austrian National Gallery is being compelled by a national arbitration board to return five paintings by Gustav Klimt to a Los Angeles based woman, the heir of a Jewish family that had its art stolen by the Nazis. The paintings are estimated to be worth at least $150 million." This incident, involving Maria Altmann, was subsequently made into the Hollywood movie Woman in Gold, starring Helen Mirren.

The paintings, including 1907's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, were sold by auction house Christie's for $325 million in 2006.[citation needed ]

In 2021 the French minister of culture announced that the only Klimt in France's national collections was Nazi loot which should be restituted to the heirs of the Jewish family that had been persecuted by Nazis. Rosebushes Under the Trees, painted in 1905, had been owned by Nora Stiasi, who had been forced to sell it before being murdered by the Nazis. It is currently hanging in France's Orsay Museum which purchased it from Swiss art dealer Peter Nathan in 1980.

A similar painting, also painted by Klimt and known as Apple Trees II, which was also Nazi loot, was mistakenly returned to the wrong family by the Austrian authorities.

Other Klimts that have been the object of ownership battles owing to a history of Nazi looting include the Beethoven Frieze, Water Snakes II, Blooming Meadow and Portrait of Gertrude Lowe.

In 2023, art collector Ronald S. Lauder, agreed to restitute and repurchase Klimt's "The Black Feather Hat," which had belonged to Irene Beran, before she fled the Nazis. The painting's provenance was unclear after it left Beran's collection, resurfacing in Stuttgart in connection to the Nazi Friedrich Welz. Beran's mother and former husband Philip were murdered by the Nazis after being deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp .

1. ^ Sotheby's: Gilded Romance: Gustav Klimt's Ornamental Style and the Influence of Japonisme, 19 June 2019

2. Daily Art Magazin: ^ 5 Facts You Need to Know About Gustav Klimt, 25 January 2022

3. Bailey, Colin B., Peter Vergo, Emily Braun, Jane Kallir, and John Collins (2001). ^ Gustav Klimt: Modernism in the Making. New York: Abrams. p. 55. ISBN 0888847181.

4. ^ Collins, John (2001). "Catalogue: Paintings". In Colin M. Bailey (ed.). Klimt: Modernism in the Making (Exhibition catalogue). Harry N. Abrams. p. 99. ISBN 978-0-8109-3524-2.

5. On 11 November 1905, the artistic commission of the ministry of education examined the projects for the panels of the University' Great Hall. The Klimt's ones were welcomed, unlike Matsch's. However, it was proposed not to exhibit them in the Great Hall, but in the ^ Österreichische Galerie. Klimt rejected the proposal and on 3 April 1905 he wrote to the aforementioned ministry renouncing the assignment, and asking for the return of the sketches, declaring himself willing to return the sum of money that had been advanced to him. In: Dobai, Johannes (1978). The Complete Works of Klimt (in Italian). Milan: Rizzoli. p. 86.

6. ^ Rogoyska, Jane; Bade, Patrick (2011). "Compositional Project for Medicine". Gustav Klimt. New York: Parkstone Press International. p. 87. ISBN 978-1-78042-729-4.

7. ^ SheilaTGTG55 (13 October 2011). "The Fire at Schloss Immendorf". Open Salon. Archived from the original on 14 October 2011.

8. ^ Johannes Dobai The Complete Works of Klimt, Rizzoli 1978. pp. 94-110.

9. According to Storkovich, in reality the alleged burned paintings were ten, not thirteen, as ^ Prozession der Toten (Procession of the dead, 1903), Malcesine am Gardasee (1913) and (1917), never came to Immendorf. Furthermore, she believes there is no convincing evidence that Klimt's three university ceiling paintings were actually destroyed.

10. Johnson, Julian, ^ Mahler's Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies. Oxford University Press (Oxford, UK), ISBN 978-0-19-537239-7, p. 235 (2009).

11. ^ Wagner, Anselm (2002), "Klimt's Landscapes and the Telescope", Gustav Klimt Landscapes, Prestel, pp. 161-71

12. Gottfried Fliedl, ^ Gustav Klimt, 1862-1918: The World in Female Form, Taschen, 1997, p. 192, ISBN 3822882577

13. ^ "University of Wales Trinity Saint David". UK: Lamp. Archived from the original on 11 August 2006.

14. ^ Reyburn, Scott (23 March 2017). "Global Art Market". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2 January 2022.

15. ^ Souren Melikian (3 November 2011). "Klimt Painting Sells for $40.4 Million". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2 January 2022.

16. ^ Sanna, Angela; Farina, Violetta (2011). Art Nouveau (in French). Paris: Editions Place des Victoires. ISBN 978-2-8099-0418-5.

17. Online-Merker: ^ WIEN/ Staatsoper: SALOME - die letzte und die beste der Serie, 25 January 2015

18. Vienna State Opera, Archive of all Performances: ^ Salome | Neuproduktion vom 22.12.1972, retrieved on 24 August 2023

19. ^ ""Red, the Transistor and some good ol' Klimt homage...!" - description of the artwork "Cloudbank" by Jen See, art director of "Transistor"". 3 June 2013.

20. ^ Jones, Jonathan (12 February 2018). "Portrait of Obama: 'This will not tell the future ages what made him special'". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077.

21. Julia Michalska (30 October 2013), ^ Vienna's Leopold Museum director resigns in protest Archived 1 November 2013 at the Wayback Machine The Art Newspaper.

22. ^ "Klimt paintings to return to owner". 29 November 2000. Archived from the original on 8 February 2001. Two paintings by Gustav Klimt, sold during the Nazi era, should be returned to their rightful heir, an Austrian government committee has recommended. The committee was set up to investigate works of art seized from Austrian Jews by the Nazis. The artworks to be returned include Lady with Hat and Feather Boa, a showpiece of the Austrian State Belvedere Museum in Vienna

23. Burbank, Luke ^ Austria to return paintings to Jewish heir, National Public Radio, 17 January 2006.

24. ^ "Gustav Klimt: art's greatest womaniser?". The Telegraph. 2 April 2015. Archived from the original on 11 January 2022.

25. ^ Breeden, Aurelien (15 March 2021). "France to Return Klimt Painting to Rightful Heirs After Nazi-Era Sale". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 16 March 2021. Stiasny was born in 1898 to a Jewish family in Vienna. The painting was passed on to her from her uncle, Viktor Zuckerkandl, a wealthy steel magnate and art collector who had bought "Rosebushes Under the Trees" in 1911. But after the Nazis annexed Austria, she was forced to sell it in 1938 "for next to nothing" to survive, Bachelot said. Stiasny was deported to Poland in 1942 and died that year, as did her husband and son.

26. ^ "Ronald S. Lauder Reaches Agreement on Klimt Painting With Jewish Heirs". New York Times.

Tobias G. Natter, Max Hollein (Eds.): Klimt & Rodin: An Artistic Encounter, DelMonico Books - Prestel Publishing, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-7913-5708-9.

Tobias G. Natter (Ed.): Gustav Klimt: The Complete Paintings, Taschen, Cologne 2012, ISBN 978-3836527958.

O'Connor, Anne-Marie (2012). The Lady in Gold, The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, ISBN 0-307-26564-1.

Tobias G. Natter, Christoph Grunenberg (Eds.):Gustav Klimt. Painting, Design and Modern Life, Tate Publishing, London 2008, ISBN 978-1-85437-735-7.

Kinsella, Eileen (January 2007), "Gold Rush", ARTnews.

Fliedl, Gottfried (1994), Gustav Klimt 1862-1918 The World in Female Form, Benedikt Taschen.

Whitford, Frank (1990), Klimt, Thames and Hudson.

Sabarsky, Serge (1983), Gustav Klimt: Drawings, et al, Moyer Bell, ISBN 0-918825-19-9 .

Salfellner, Harald (2018), Klimt. An Illustrated Life.

The Belvedere Vienna & The Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam (editors) (2023), Klimt. Inspired by Van Gogh, Rodin, Matisse.... Hirmer. ISBN 978-3-77743-518-3.

Kallir, Jane, Alfred Weidinger: Gustav Klimt. In Search of the Total Artwork. Prestel, New York 2009, ISBN 978-3-7913-4232-0

Kränsel, Nina: Gustav Klimt. Prestel, 2007, ISBN 978-3-7913-3779-1

Weidinger, Alfred. Klimt. Catalogue Raisonné, Prestel, New York, 2007, ISBN 978-3-7913-3764-7

Czernin, Hubertus: Die Fälschung: Der Fall Bloch-Bauer und das Werk Gustav Klimts. Czernin Verlag, Vienna 2006. ISBN 3-7076-0000-9

Tobias G. Natter, Max Hollein (Eds.): The Naked Truth: Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka and other Scandals, Prestel, Munich, 2005, ISBN 3-7913-3284-8.

Tobias G. Natter: Die Welt von Klimt, Schiele und Kokoschka. Sammler und Mäzene, DuMont, Cologne 2003, ISBN 3-8321-7258-0.

Schorske, Carl E. "Gustav Klimt: Painting and the Crisis of the Liberal Ego" in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. Vintage Books, 1981. ISBN 0-394-74478-0

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Gustav Klimt (14 July 1862 - 6 February 1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. Klimt is noted for his paintings, murals, sketches, and other objets d'art. Klimt's primary subject was the female body, and his works are marked by a frank eroticism.

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"Street Scene at Night"

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"Violette Heymann", 1910

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"The Buddha", 1905

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“The Cyclops”, 1914

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Fiona, you haven't worked out the full five principles. I know you have thoughts about this and are almost there, but you need to get it done. Especially before you meet with your team.
EC 14 Nov

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A tendancy away from narrative towards abstraction.

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A tendancy away from narrative towards abstraction.

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There is a lot of variety here. And I think you personally have a very graphic and sensuous sensibility.

You have at least 2 principles here. Keep thinking about other qualities that seem to speak of modernism.

And you seem to like organizing your thoughts through imagery.

A good place to search for pictures is ARTStor.org. Do an "advanced search." Check a few categories (like Europe, painting, sculpture) and set date parameters (short ones, like 1870-1900, 1900-1930). Then put just a word or two into the search box. Like "figure" or "landscape" or "still life." See what pops up.

Or you can search for individual artists.

EC

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"Centaur Kiss"

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"Ballets Russes"

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“Gardens Study of the Vicker Children”

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Painting by Gustav Klimt, 1914, Portrait of Elisabeth Baroness Bachofen-Echt, oil on canvas。

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Self-consciousness of the use of color, brushwork, and composition

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Self-consciousness of the use of color, brushwork, and composition

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“The Maidens"

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“Madame X”

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Without question, modernist texts have been haunted by what can be known, or more aptly, what cannot be known. This position is foundational to one of the pivotal readings of modernism. Simultaneously, economic, legal, and political shifts that occurred during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced real material changes pertaining to the status of women.

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Dipiction of personal subjects, everyday life, feelings and emotion.

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Dipiction of personal subjects, everyday life, feelings and emotion.

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Bold And direct, breaking classical rules and expectations

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Bold And direct, breaking classical rules and expectations

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A lover of Courbet!  It will be interesting.

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Gustave Courbet - The Complete Works - gustavecourbet.org

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The complete works of Gustave Courbet. Large resolution images, rating, ecard, download possibility.

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Gustave Courbet - 270 paintings - WikiArt.org

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Gustave Courbet was a controversial French painter, who bridged the gap between Romanticism and the Impressionist school of painters. He was controversial not only because he addressed social issues with his work, such as peasants and the working condition of the poor, and the rural bourgeoisie, but also because of the unsentimental way in which he portrayed them.