Gustav Klimt: Expectation and Fulfillment – Note card Folio. 10 cards 5×7 in. (5 of each design) in a folio set.
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At the turn of the twentieth century, the Austrian art world saw a mighty clash between the tradition-bound style of the Vienna Academy and the power, eroticism, and symbolism of works by the Vienna Secession, a group of artists cofounded by Gustav Klimt. Thus in 1899 a critic called one of Klimt’s early portraits, executed in an academically acceptable mode, “the most beautiful picture ever painted by an Austrian,” and a year or so later the critics excoriated Klimt (1862-1918) for his brash new style.
Klimt had rejected the mainstream and become a brilliant avant-garde outcast whose work flirted with pure abstraction. The paintings that scandalized Klimt’s contemporaries are now seen as graceful, achingly sensual and striking in the depth of their emotional subjectivity: faces are rendered with tender clarity; bodies float, blur, evanesce into shimmering abstract forms.
The images reproduced in this folio of notecards are detail studies for a frieze in a lavish ultramodern mansion designed in 1904 by Josef Hoffmann, an architect affiliated with the Secession. Klimt took a number of other commissions to decorate interiors, but the Stoclet Palace is the only structure with a Klimt mural to have survived the firestorms of World War II.
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