From the Viennese Secession to Italy. Gustav Klimt is on display in Rome
The exhibition at Palazzo Braschi in Rome, open on March 27, was created in collaboration with the Belvedere Museum in Vienna and the Klimt Foundation.
Gold, eros, women, death. The essential elements of the aesthetics of Finis Austriae dominates the exhibition Klimt. The Secession and Italy. The Austrian artist in Rome, 110 years ago, after having participated with a personal room at the 1910 Venice Biennale, was awarded at the 1911 International Art Exhibition.
The key word of the retrospective is influences: those who shaped the works of the Viennese and those offered to the many who let themselves be inspired by him.
200 works – including paintings, drawings, vintage posters and sculptures – represent a set of masterpieces created by Klimt and by the artists of his circle or similar to him, including his brother Ernst and Franz Matsch.
It is a visual tale of the Vienna Secession that wanted to adapt art to the lifestyles of the time. That is, he yearned for that modernity which had to meet the needs of the present. An intent that was not, however, easy to achieve, as the history of the first Secessionist manifesto demonstrates.
Klimt depicted Theseus naked and engaged in fighting the Minotaur, but the authorities imposed a censorship, decreeing that the hero’s genitals should be hidden by a tree trunk. And so it was. (the two posters are on display).
The new and total art
The artists of the Secession they are opposed to the artistic paradigms of the, eager above all to cross the academic boundaries to propose and age a new art. A contrast that everyone interprets in his own way, how to demonstrate the internal stylistic differences. There are those who were more focused on the study of reality (it is an example of this Vlastimil Hofman with her Madonna) and who was more oriented towards Art Nouveau.
The Vienna sky was under the influence of Gesamtkunstwerk, the aestheticizing utopia, the aspiration to the total work of art, to the union of all the arts and life. It is no coincidence that a staple of the movement was the close link between the fine arts, architecture and design. They were part of the important group of architects, innovative designers and set designers, come Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Koloman Moser And Alfred Roller.
This aspiration to unity translates into a complex art capable of combining different stimuli in harmony. If the use of gold is nothing more than a paternal inheritance (Ernst senior was a goldsmith) we can trace the Ravenna mosaics and Venetian glass decorations in many of Klimt’s works.
Its influence, however, we trace it in the secessionists enters other artists, as evidenced by the masterpiece of Casorati Prayer.
Eros and gold
Many of the paintings on display are gods landscapes, a theme dear to the artist but for which he is much less known. I female portraits, for which he is instead famous, appear all the glory of his aesthetics.
Her head lightly backwards, her eyes and lips half closed, Judith in a blaze of gold, it is eros and thanathos. The gaze that turns to the viewer is a triumph of ecstasy and voluptuousness. The painter was in fact inspired by the version of the myth of Judith in which the heroine lies with Holofernes before killing him.
Judith I remains an iconic work capable of representing one of Klimt’s obsessions, the dangerous one fatal woman. For the first time in Italy even the last and unfinished, The bride, which he created inspired by a short story by Schnitzler. Dreamlike and erotic, it responds perfectly to the dictates of Klimtian aesthetics.
Mysteries and reconstructions
It also features the Portrait of a lady mysteriously disappeared in 1997 at the Ricci Oddio Gallery of Modern Art and found in an external wall of the Piacenza museum in 2019.
In one of the larger rooms, accompanied by the Ninth symphonywas reproduced instead The Beethoven Frieze which represents the aspiration to happiness in a suffering world in which we fight not only against external hostile forces, but also with internal weaknesses.
Three paintings, thanks to Google Arts & Culture Lab team, come back to life through digital reconstruction. It’s me Faculty cadres – Medicine, Law And The philosophy -, a majestic allegory conceived for the ceiling of the Aula Magna of the University of Vienna which at the time refused the commissioned works considering them too scandalous.