The art of Gustav Klimt makes me feel as though I am face to face with God, if God is a charming, faintly trashy type who leers more than he enlightens and seems oddly desperate for my approval. Klimt’s mysticism is a kind of busy stagecraft, all confetti cannons and angels dangling from ropes. It drove people wild a hundred and twenty-five years ago and still does, though a closer look at his path from academic painter to Viennese radical to professional heiress-glorifier suggests a man stuck between nineteenth- and twentieth-century attitudes, and all the more fascinating for it. In a photograph taken around 1908, a decade before his death, he wears a floor-length smock and points his big, wolfish head at the darkness, arms crossed. He looks like a crook disguised as a priest, the better to get his way.
A version of the smock, and many of the paintings he finished while wearing it, can be found at “Klimt Landscapes,” the Neue Galerie’s second major show since closing for renovations last summer. The theme is a head-scratcher: who thinks of Klimt, with his gold leaf and gorgeous women, as a painter of nature? Only a small fraction of the works here qualify as landscapes, and many of these were completed toward the end of Klimt’s life, when he was between portraits of wealthy sitters, summering in the Austrian countryside and—the show stresses this point— painting for his own pleasure. When artists create for themselves, we tend to assume that the results are more personal, but the rule seems iffier in the case of this taciturn yet resolutely public figure, who may have been most himself when he had spectators and a trunkful of props to wow them with.
Denne historien er fra March 25, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra March 25, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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LIFE ADVICE WITH ANIMAL ANALOGIES
Go with the flow like a dead fish.
CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS
The masterly musical as mblages of Charles Ives
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
How the Brothers Grimm sought to awaken a nation.
THE ARTIFICIAL STATE
A different kind of machine politics.
THE HONEST ISLAND GREG JACKSON
Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come.
THE SHIPWRECK DETECTIVE
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure-without leaving dry land.
THE HOME FRONT
Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.
PRESIDENT FOR SALE
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll.
SYRIA'S EMPIRE OF SPEED
Bashar al-Assad's regime is now a narco-state reliant on sales of amphetamines.
TUCKER EVERLASTING
Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.