Tag Archives: gustav klimt

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Gustav Klimt, Mäda Primavesi

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gustav klimt mada primavesi photo by gail worley
Photo By Gail

Mäda Primavesi (1912–1913) is a portrait painted by Gustav Klimt and it’s one of his most charming and unique works. Here’s the painting’s engaging backstory.

The Subject

Mäda Primavesi was a young girl from a wealthy Viennese family. Her father,  Otto Primavesi, was a banker and industrialist, and her mother, Eugenia, was a patron of the arts, so the family moved in the kind of circles where commissioning a portrait from Gustav Klimt made perfect sense.
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Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Bertold Loffler, Youth Playing the Pipes of Pan

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youth playing the pipes of pan photo by gail worley
Photo By Gail

Bertold Loffler’s most important painting, Youth Playing the Pipes of Pan (1912), reveals his passion for classicism, from the garlanded youth and draped female attendants to the vase at their feet, depicting Pan, the Greek god of untamed nature, playing a double flute. The flat, stylized composition and the bold patterns on the women’s cloaks reflect Loffler’s work as a designer for the cutting-edge Austrian artists’ association the Wiener Werkstätte. Eduard Ast, a major patron of the group, acquired the canvas and hung it in the dining room of his newly-built villa in Vienna, across the hall from Gustav Klimt’s painting of the mythological heroine Danaë (1907 – 08), which is in a private collection.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

 

 

Arts and Culture

Ian Davenport, Doubletake at Paul Kasmin Gallery

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Ian Davenport Installation View 2
All Photos By Gail

Paul Kasmin Gallery is currently hosting Doubletake, an exhibition of new paintings by the British artist Ian Davenport. This is Davenport’s first solo show at the gallery since 2013’s Colorfall.

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Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Gustav Klimt, The Park

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The Park
Photo By Gail

From Gustav Klimt Dot Com:

Pointillism clearly influenced this painting, even though, unlike Seurat, Gustav Klimt never expressed an interest in utilizing optics in his work. Nine-tenths of The Park (1909) is a solid mass of foliage, thus if not for the tree trunks and strips of grass at the bottom, this composition would be wholly abstract. The painting’s naturalistic elements are offset by Klimt’s decorative mosaic of blue, green and yellow dots, which are rendered representational only with the aid of the work’s lower section. This is a visually demanding work, and possibly one of Klimt’s finest plein air paintings (although many of his landscapes were finished in the studio, all were begun in the open air). He painted these throughout his career, but to this day they are celebrated far less than his portraits.

Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer II

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Adele Bloch Bauer
Photo By Gail

This painting  is one of two formal portraits that Klimt made of Adele Bloch-Bauer, one of the artists most important patrons.  The wife of the successful industrialist, Bloch-Bauer  was a prominent member of the Vienna’s  cultural elite, serving as a key supporter of the arts and the founder of a salon for artists and writers. Klimt’s  composition, completed when Bloch-Bauer was about 30 years old, emphasizes her social station: her towering figure, in opulent dress,  extends to the vertical limits of the canvas and confronts the viewer head-on from its center.  She poses against a jewel-toned backdrop of nearly abstract pattern blocks that suggest a richly decorated domestic interior.

In 1938,  the Nazi government took possession of this portrait along with other works of art from the Bloch-Bauer family collection (including Adele Bloch-Bauer I, now in the collection of the Neue Gallerie  in New York). In 2006, after years of legal negotiations, the works were returned to the Bloch-Bauer heirs and subsequently sold to other collections. The Museum of Modern Art presents Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912) as a generous loan from its current owner.