Saturday, July 14, 2012

Great Masters - Gustav Klimt

 

 

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Today,  14th July 2012  is 150th Birth Anniversary of the great Austrian painter, Gustav Klimt

His famous painting ‘The Kiss’ shown above on stamp is a symbol of Vienna Secession. Influenced by European avant-garde movements represented in the annual Secession exhibitions, Klimt's mature style combined richly decorative surface patterning with complex symbolism and allegory, often with overtly erotic content.

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Gustav Klimt's style is highly ornamental. The Art Nouveau movement favored organic lines and contours. Klimt used a lot of gold and silver colors in his art work - certainly an heritage from his father's profession.

imageGustav Klimt (1862-1918) was one of the most innovative and controversial artists of the early twentieth century. Klimt’s highly decorative, erotic female figures were influenced by an enormous range of sources: classical Greek art, Byzantine mosaics, late-medieval painting, the woodcuts of Albrecht Durer, photography and the Symbolist art of Max Klinger. The Nouveau Art movement in Austria was called the Secession. As a co-founder of the Vienna Secession, a group of artists and architects who formed their own exhibition society and denounced the classical academic training of the time, his work embodied the high-keyed erotic, psychological and aesthetic preoccupations of fin-de-siècle Viennese intellectuals.

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