Gustav Klimt: From Drawing to Painting - Hardcover

Nebehay, Christian M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810935104 ISBN 13: 9780810935105

Publisher: Harry N. Abrams, 1994

Synopsis

Explores the turn-of-the-century Viennese painter's life and work, highlights the utopian Seccession movement of which Klimt was a leader, and reproduces the artist's paintings, sketches, and correspondence

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

Andrew Wyeth's Helgas be damned. Klimt's erotic turn-of-the- century Viennese paintings have of late become popular iconographic fodder, and this handsome and luxuriant coffee-table extravaganza goes a long way to showing why. Nebehay's father was a friend and art dealer of Klimt's (18621918). The author himself is an Austrian antiquarian bookseller and scholar of Klimt, and of his notorious student, Egon Schiele. Nebehay puts his penchant for detail to great use as he incorporates a lively variety of visual sources: period postcards, posters, sepia photographs of the artist and his milieu, industrial-design objects of the period, examples of Viennese Ringstrasse neo-baroque architecture, and facsimile reproductions of sketchbook pages and correspondences. Special attention is paid to Vienna's utopian Secession movement, of which Klimt served as de facto leader. Its members included Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann, and Joseph Maria Olbrich. The work of these men, as well as that of Klimt's students Oskar Kokoschka and Schiele, is detailed in depth in the author's workmanlike and thoroughly annotated text. The book's real strength, though, is pictorial. The images are arranged in powerful juxtapositions. Klimt's loose and mellifluous pencil studies of nudes are counterposed with his intricate and stiffly stylized finished paintings. Elsewhere, full-bleed double-page spreads are effectively employed to reproduce sketchbook studies- -virtuoso doodlings in India ink of achingly erotic waifs and hollow-eyed death skulls. Lastly, a curriculum vitae time line is augmented with photos, Klimt's personal writings, and exhaustive supporting notes. In all, a package filled with studious information that succeeds foremost through its daring and stylish visual presentation. As art books go, this one offers quite the ride--heights of intoxicating decadence tethered down by scrupulous scholarly documentation. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal

This lavish book invites the reader to step into late 19th-century Vienna, with its intricately detailed social life and sumptuous luxury, not unlike the work of the artist who is the book's focus. The author, who knew Klimt in his last years and is a noted Klimt scholar, has brought together the paintings and the drawings from which they emerged in a way that enriches our knowledge of the artist and enhances the visual impact of his work. Using original sources, newly uncovered material, and a wealth of personal photographs, Nebehay provides a look into the major influence of Klimt upon his fellow artists and upon his society: his role as the first president of the Vienna Secession; his place in the lives of his students, among them Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka; and his interaction with all the major figures of this most dangerously intoxicating and exhilarating time. The book conveys the passions that were the subject of Klimt's work and his life. Highly recommended.
Paula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum of Art Lib., New York
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0810935104
• ISBN 13: 9780810935105
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288