CLEARANCE policy
Gilles Neret
Hardcover | 21 x 1.3 x 26 cm | 96 pp
Taschen | 2017 | 9783836558075
Each title from the Basic Art Series provides a comprehensive introduction to a significant artist, architect, or designer. The publications offer a detailed chronological summary of the artist’s life and work and analyse their historical importance and cultural legacy. Readers are taken through the subjects’ biographies and become familiar with key works illustrated in high quality reproductions.
This book presents a selection of Klimt's work, introducing his pictorial world of decoration and desire, as well as his influence on artists to come. The unfading popularity of Gustav Klimt (1862 1918) attests not only to the particular appeal of his luxuriant painting but also to the universal themes with which he worked: love, feminine beauty, ageing, and death.
The son of a goldsmith, Klimt created surfaces of ornate and jewel-like luminosity which show influence of both Egyptian and Japanese art. Through paintings, murals, and friezes, his work is defined by radiant colour, fluid lines, floral elements, and mosaic-like patterning.
With a number of subjects dealing with sensuality and desire as well as anxiety and despair, all this iridescence is also suffused with feeling. Klimt's numerous images of women, characterised by curvaceous forms, tender flesh, red lips and flushed cheeks, were particularly charged with passion, at a time when such frank eroticism was still taboo in Viennese upper middle class society.
