A reflection on the details of Blumengarten by Gustav Klimt. 506 words.
I very much admire the work of the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) including the landscapes which he painted in his later years. I have lived with a poster of Blumengarten for many years and feel that this reflects my taste in art and has influenced my own ideas and work.
Gustav Klimt founded the Vienna Secession together with a group of artists who wished to break away from the mainstream art of the time in Austria and look, instead, towards Europe’s artistic trends. They formed an Art Nouveau movement in Austria.
Klimt was originally involved in the creation of decorative murals and ceilings together with his brother. He was influenced by his study of art collections in the Vienna museum – collections from Ancient Egypt to Renaissance Florence. Another influence was his study of Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna which he is known to have visited. This resulted in Klimt having a very distinctive individual style of highly decorative work in both his sensuous figure paintings and his detailed semi-abstract landscapes.
Blumengarten is painted on a square canvas and is composed of a highly decorative profusion of blooms, leaves and blades of grass. The subject matter appears to be chopped off by the edges of the canvas which gives the impression of the canvas as a viewing window onto a landscape. There are no other landscape elements or indications of light and shadow. This gives the work a 2-D abstract effect rather than 3-D effect. The overall effect is of a highly decorative semi-abstract work that still, because of the level of detail, is semi-realistic and suggests a flower border. The subject matter is clearly landscape based – these are not flowers in a vase – and therefore Klimt is calling attention to the beauty of nature and the richness and detail of patterns and colours found there. The irregular clumps of colour of the blooms – reds, pinks and oranges – make the eye roam over the painting again and again.
However there is also an other-worldliness about Blumengarten and Klimt’s art which owes itself to Klimt’s unique style and internal vision of beauty. Blumengarten has a luminous quality due to the patterns of dark and light areas juxtaposed with the vibrant intense colours used for the blooms. Klimt originally used gold paint in his early figure paintings – a legacy perhaps from his original work in ceiling and mural decoration. In his later work and later landscapes this has been replaced with the use of coloured paint – reds, oranges and pinks abound in Blumengarten with a luminous effect.
Included below is a picture of Blumengarten and also an example of my own work. The latter is an abstract collage in square format with use of 2-D effect and pattern and colour to depict an abstract flower garden.
Information about Gustav Klimt has been sourced from the book “Klimt” by Catherine Dean.
