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.
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.
Gustav 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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