Let's Talk About Klimt

Is the great Viennese artist vulgar or beautiful?

Lady With Fan, by Gustave Klimt (1918).

I have mixed feelings about Gustav Klimt. My brain wants to dislike him, my heart thinks otherwise. His art is irresistibly modern, and yet (lets face it) somewhat derivative. He remains the most enduringly “modern” of the modernists, and at the same time the least modernist of the moderns. Which is another way of saying that his art, now as it was then, is extremely well-suited to commercial reproduction. The cult-status that Klimt has been afforded today is due not just to his brilliance, but also to how suitable his work is for souvenirs, with his art adorning posters, dish-towels, and fridge magnets, to name but a few of the commemorative trinkets and other ‘Vienna-tat’ which one can buy in any museum store. Simply put, Klimt is “tasteful”. And, as Karl Kraus, the notorious fire-breathing critic of 19th century Vienna observed, “Taste is the death of art.”

And yet Klimt paints the most beautiful portraits. Magnificent, allegorical, sensuous women, dressed in finery, standing against oriental tapestries. Or lying in bed together, their bodies curled and intertwined. Always erotic, never pornographic. I love his landscapes, and how they seem almost like mosaics. But at the same time they lend themselves all too well to what I would refer to as “wallpaper” art, both in the literal and in the digital sense.

If “decorative art” was once considered a bad word, today the idea of “background” art is omnipresent. From the dreamily bland Spotify playlist to the Klimt reproductions on a café wall. If the definition of successful art is to pleasantly fade into the background, then Klimt is truly the most highly decorated of the decorative artists. An artist for our overstimulated times, who both soothes our aggravated nerves and tends to our psychic wounds. And isn’t Klimt’s stylistic signature precisely that he idealizes? If he is the least modern of the modernists, then certainly one might add to this that he is also the most European of the (English) Pre-Raphaelites.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t like Klimt.

Of course I do. How could I not? In the same way that I listen to Satie’s Gymnopédies, or to Max Richter’s Sleep, I’d rather gently turn the pages of Taschen’s Klimt coffee-table book, than ruminate over Behr’s expressionist Berlin paintings.

But just because something is pleasant doesn’t make it inoffensive. Which is to say that the dreams Klimt evokes and the dreaming subjects he portrays, are distinctly modern in that they comfort us, rather than provoke. And whilst art does not necessarily have to be provocative, it does raise certain questions. For example, how and why does Klimt’s Viennese aristocratic fantasy remain so seductive today? Why do his paintings (like the one above) sell for gargantuan sums? The simple answer is this. They are nice to look at.

But shouldn’t art be beautiful? Shouldn’t we, as Oscar Wilde once observed, surround ourselves with beautiful things and reject the vulgar? What if Klimt’s true revolution is to make vulgar art that is nevertheless entirely beautiful? That is why I have mixed feelings about Klimt, the most beautiful vulgarian of early 20th century Vienna.

Julian

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