Klimt: Inspired by Van Gogh, Rodin, Matisse

by Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam (Editor), The Belvedere Vienna (Editor)

A lavish volume revealing the artists who inspired Gustav Klimt, the great master of Viennese Modernism.

Throughout his career, Gustav Klimt was attentive to the work of his contemporaries, including Lawrence Alma-Tadema, George Minne, Auguste Rodin, Jan Toorop, Ferdinand Hodler, Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet, Fernand Khnopff, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Henri Matisse, and many others, and he continually adapted elements from a variety of styles. This stunning volume presents in large-format illustrations the works of Klimt alongside those of artists who were close to him, revealing significant and often surprising parallels. With these juxtapositions, we see Klimt contrasted with artists who worked in a variety of styles and techniques, all very different from Klimt’s. These pages offer new insight into not just the work of Klimt and his contemporaries, but also the ways that artists share innovations in style and subject, and how the influence of an artistic milieu reveals itself in unexpected ways. The result is a lavishly illustrated volume about Modernism featuring many outstanding and iconic artworks from the beloved masters of the time. 

Genres: Nonfiction, Art

240 pages, Hardcover

Published February 2, 2023

Reviews

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book offers the first comprehensive overview of Gustav Klimt in the context of the artists who inspired him, following the exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (7 October 2022 - 8 January 2023) and the Belvedere in Vienna (3 February - 29 May 2023).
The modern and innovative European art of around 1900 encouraged Gustav Klimt to break away from the Viennese painting tradition and follow his own course. Artists' association Wiener Secession, of which Klimt was a co-founder, showed a survey of European avant-garde artists for the first time in 1898. Every exhibition organised by the association thereafter marked a new wave of inspiration and creativity for Klimt. He let it influence his work and did not disguise his artistic sources. Besides the characteristic elements like gold leaf, graceful forms and eroticism, painterly aspects from the work of Van Gogh, Matisse, Rodin, Whistler, Toorop, Monet and many others became part of Klimt's appealing style.
I have visited the exhibition October 11, 2022. Klimt’s work was splendidly shown in a variety of contexts, as mentioned. The only opportunity to visit the exhibition is in the Belvedere in Vienna, until May 29, 2023.
Although this book doesn’t exactly follow the exhibition, the in depth written essays enlighten Klimt’s inspirations as splendidly as the real works are/ were shown. JM

[Tosca Wijns-Van Eeden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gebaseerd op de tentoonstelling bestaat dit bijbehorende boek niet per definitie uit een overzicht van de tentoonstelling, maar is echt een compagnon en verklaring over het overzicht.

Bestaande uit diverse essays wordt het leven van Klimt en zijn inspiratiebronnen uitgelegd. In de tekst verweven zitten de kunstwerken die op de tentoonstelling zichtbaar waren, maar veel meer dan dat ook!
Het is dus niet zozeer een tentoonstellingsoverzicht zoals dat gebruikelijk is (die ontbreekt namelijk volledig), maar een reis door zijn inspiratiebronnen.

Eigenlijk een must-have voor mensen die van Klimt's werk houden en meer willen weten!

[Servabo · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a long time, art history held conflicting views about Gustav Klimt and modern art. On the one hand, he was without doubt the pivotal figure in the modernist movement of Vienna 1900, which within a very short space of time, had achieved world renown and recognition. On the other hand, from the very beginning, he was dismissed as a superficial "decorator," especially by Western European art historians and critics, and even by prominent Viennese contemporaries. Indeed, as recently as the end of the last century, some critics were still surprised by the increasing visitor numbers at exhibitions of his work, and particularly by the soaring prices achieved at auction. There are many reasons why, in the past, Klimt's paintings did not enjoy the status that they do today. Certainly, one of the most important is that he had little direct contact with the influential personalities of the Western European avant-garde, and he himself did not exert any noteworthy influence on artistic developments in Paris.

Ironically, Klimt's leading position as a passionate, world-ranking modernist was only restored with the advent of postmodern perspectives in art-historical discourse. It is precisely the fact that he was not actively involved in the creative worlds of Paris and other Western European centers of the avant-garde, but instead, with others developed an independent movement, now summarized under the heading "Vienna 1900", that has subsequently accounted for the great appeal of this phenomenon.