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Gustav Klimt's World of Drawings Gustav Klimt's drawings are among the finest creations in the artist's oeuvre. This is particularly true of Klimt's later years, when drawing became in many ways, the key area of his artistic exploration. This very varied collection of seventeen drawings spans the years 1905 to the period shortly before the artist's death in 1918 and covers the full range of the artist's subject matter during these last years. From sketches and preparations for portraits, to erotic drawings and studies for many of Klimt's late masterpieces, the seventeen drawings in this collection collectively illustrate the full range and depth of Klimt's outstanding ability as a draughtsman. As such they present a remarkable insight into the intimate world of drawing with which this enigmatic and brilliant artist surrounded himself. Klimt's brilliance and originality as a draughtsman was only really recognised after the artist's death because during his lifetime Klimt hardly ever sold his drawings and never thought to exhibit them. For Klimt, his drawings represented a private world in which he increasingly explored his own obsession with the woman and his notions of femininity. Indeed, many of Klimt's drawings have still never been seen in public because like the seventeen drawings in this collection, they entered into a private collection directly from the artist and have remained there ever since. Dr Marian Bisanz-Prakken has suggested that all the signatures on these drawings seem to date from 1917 which possibly suggests that they were selected and bought in consultation with Klimt who shortly before handing them over signed them all together in one session. From the very beginning of his career Klimt was obsessed with drawing. From contemporary accounts of his life he seems to have been perpetually sketching or drawing and he is known to have often interrupted work on a painting to suddenly draw something completely unconnected with the work in progress. Drawing was an essential activity for him, as it not only formed the basis of his highly graphic art but was clearly also the language in which he thought, and in later years his drawing increasingly became the main language through which his visual ideas were expressed. Yet, for all his love of drawing and his need for it, Klimt was notoriously nonchalant about his graphic work. His studio is known to have been littered with works which, once finished, he treated with a casualness that amazed and horrified the critic Arthur Roessler when he visited Klimt. "As I rummaged around in a heap of hundreds of drawings, surrounded by eight or ten mewing and purring cats playfully chasing each other about and making sketches...fly." Roessler further recalled: "I asked in surprise why he put up with them ruining hundreds of the most beautiful drawings in this way. With a smirk Klimt replied: 'It doesn't matter if they crumple or tear a few sheets - they piss on others, and, don't you know ?, that's the best fixative'." (Arthur Roessler, Der Melrkasten, Kunstleranekdoten, Vienna, 1924, p. 112). This visit took place before 1904 and Klimt does seem to have grown less casual about his graphic work and to have taken it more seriously from around 1906 onwards. From around this time, Klimt abandoned the black chalk and cheap wove packing paper that he had previously used and adopted a more expensive simili Japan paper onto which he drew in pencil. He also began to introduce colour into his drawings and white chalk as a means of heightening the sense of volume. The range of his subject matter grew and increasingly he produced drawings of such exquisite and self-sustaining beauty that they can be considered works of art in their own right. Many of these drawings are not even sketches or preparatory studies but independent works of art that explore Klimt's obsession with woman. The most striking and often the most beautiful are his erotic drawings which, from 1911 onwards, form an ever greater proportion of his oeuvre. Women were for Klimt as fundamental to his art as drawing was. The linearity of drawing, its line, gave Klimt the means by which to express himself; women gave him the form, and it was through the female form that all Klimt's ideas were expressed. From his controversial University murals where Klimt was commissioned to paint a series of pictorial interpretations of the sciences of Philosophy, Medicine, Jurisprudence and the Law, to the Beethoven Frieze, Klimt used the naked female form as a means of expressing even the most complex abstract ideas."Woman is the major creation" he famously asserted, and it was from her that he took his lessons in creativity, endlessly painting and drawing the naked female body. Surrounding himself with women, he painted his last male portrait in 1899. From then onwards, even though the scandal of the University murals made him totally reliant on private patronage, Klimt almost only ever painted women. They became for him a representation of the world. Moving away from the femmes fatales of the fin-de-siècle, and his renditions of fatal temptresses such as Judith, Salome, or the Wasserschlangen, Klimt began to investigate the primal mystery of the woman through endless studies of her naked body. Creating a harem-like environment for himself Klimt lived a hermetic existence amongst his cats and his models, while drawing became the primary means by which he sought to investigate the poetic mystery of the female. As Servaes recalled of Klimt's studio, "Here he was surrounded by mysterious, naked female creatures, who while he stood silent in front of his easel, strolled around his studio, stretching themselves, lazing around and making the best of the day - always ready for the command of the master obediently to stand still whenever he caught sight of a pose or a movement that appealed to his sense of beauty and that he would then capture in a rapid drawing." (cited in Artist in Context: Gustav Klimt, Frank Whitford, London, 1993, p. 117). Klimt was notoriously generous with his models and the majority came to depend on him both emotionally and financially. As a result, in his studio Klimt had models who were prepared to touch themselves in front of him and to pose in lesbian or heterosexual love scenes and who were also available to him 'for relaxation'. Although Klimt's erotic drawings were intended solely for his own private use they form a large and key part of his late oeuvre and underlie a wider attempt to raise sexuality to the level of art. Throughout his life the overt sexuality of Klimt's work had manifested itself and in his late work he sought, through important allegorical paintings like Tod und Leben, Die Jungfrau, and Die Braut to establish sexuality as life's fundamental motivating force. (Many of the nude figure drawings in this collection are studies for these major allegorical works.) Working in the city of Sigmund Freud and, less reputably, Otto Weininger, Klimt's aims are reflective of much progressive thinking in fin-de-siècle Vienna. Yet, because it is a part of this milieu, his work has often been criticised for being solely aimed at the male viewer and exploring only a limited range of female emotion. Abandoning the femme fatale of earlier years, Klimt's late works primarily focuses in the passive woman who is asleep, dreaming or sexually aroused and thus it has sometimes been seen as a reduction of the female to this passive element. Yet this reduction, is more of a concentration by the artist in an attempt to strike at the heart of his own fascination with the mystery of the female and it can be seen most clearly in Klimt's drawings. Klimt's naked women are often placed on the empty page with an unerring sense of accuracy. The delicate and usually only outlined form is always positioned perfectly amidst the vast empty white space around her. At the centre of the composition and often emphasised is the woman's sex, usually drawn with painstaking care and detail so that it forms the central vortex of the woman's body and the composition as a whole. His numerous drawings of women pleasing themselves (see Lot 8 and 15) reinforce this centrality and to some degree perhaps also reflect the purest expression of the artist's voyeuristic fascination with woman as Other. Klimt was fascinated with all aspects of women and the naked models in his studio form only a part of his fascination. As the most respected portrait painter of his day Klimt also came into contact with ladies of fashionable Viennese society who introduced him to the sophistication and decadence of modern Vienna and their own articulation of a woman's role within it. Given a glimpse of the modern society's hostess' lifestyle Klimt often translated his portraits of these patrons into some of the first portraits of women to hint at the sitter's psychology. Five of the drawings in this collection are studies for the Bildnis Frau Amalie Zuckerkandl and Damenbildnis both of which remained unfinished at the time of Klimt's death in 1918. Although Klimt had forced himself to rely on private patronage, there were more than enough wealthy individuals anxious to buy or commission work from him and he soon established a waiting list for his portraits. The Bildnis Frau Amalie Zuckerkandl was commissioned from him by the journalist and critic Berta Zuckerkandl, one of the artist's keenest admirers and supporters. Two sketches from this collection show the artist playing with the seated pose of the sitter. The Damenbildnis of 1917-18 was Klimt's third and finest version of a posthumous portrait of Ria Munk - a cousin of his most important patron August Lederer. The standing pose of Ria wearing a fashionable Japanese kimono in this painting is clearly based on the drawing Dame in Kimono nach links (see Lot 5) while the two other portraits of women from the collection that are also believed to be early studies for this portrait (see Lot 11 and 12) are works of such exquisite touch and attention to detail that, whoever they depict, rank among the finest of all of Klimt's portrait drawings. As this fascinating collection of his drawings illustrates, Klimt's work is ultimately an expression of a unique time and place; one that to our modern eyes, is now clearly a bygone age. Through his portraits of the women of the age and his private interpretation of female sexuality, Klimt's drawings capture a sense of that peculiar innocence in the midst of the decadence that characterised the fin-de-siècle world of Vienna, a fleeting glorious but ultimately fragile age that would soon disappear forever. For, the figures and faces looking out at us from Klimt's drawings and paintings were, unbeknownst to them, looking over the edge of an abyss. The decadence and arrogance of the Austro-Hungarian ruling classes were the key factors in starting the First World War, a war which would witness the complete collapse of their empire and sow the seeds for the next war. Indeed, it was an unsuccessful Viennese artist, enraged by the humiliation of defeat and brought up on the doctrines of extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism of Vienna's doss-houses who would instigate the Second World War. In many ways a continuation of the First World War, the Nazi Holocaust that accompanied the war would see many of the families of Klimt's patrons killed in (among them Amalie Zuckerkandl and her daughter) and many other of the artist's finest paintings were destroyed. Amongst these was August Lederer's outstanding collection of Klimt's work, which included the celebrated paintings Philosophie, Leda and Die Freundinnen, and which was burned by SS troups in 1945. Klimt's death in early 1918 preceeded the death of the Hapsburg Empire by only seven months but in a way it is fitting that the artist did not have to witness the complete disintegration of the flowering culture in which he had lived. By the end of 1918, not only Klimt, but, the architect Otto Wagner, the designer Koloman Moser, and the artist Egon Schiele would also be dead. Vienna's Sacred Spring had turned suddenly into Autumn. Klimt who had never strayed far from Vienna throughout his life was, as the painter Anton Faistauer wrote after his death, "conceivable only in Vienna (or) better still in Budapest or Constantinople... His entire spirituality is Oriental. Eros plays a dominant role, his taste for women is almost Turkish...Klimt never looked westwards and with the exception of a journey to Spain and to Paris was never interested in Western culture...Klimt's personality was the same as his work...He loved the good life and peace and quiet like a true Oriental and looked like one, too." (cited in Artist in context : Gustav Klimt, Frank Whitford, London, 1993, p. 149.) The quintessential Viennese artist Klimt, through his drawings has bequeathed a precious visual diary of the unique and now lost world in which he lived. Gustav Klimt's Drawings by Dr. Marian Bisanz-Prakken Gustav Klimt's drawings occupy a place all their own, both in Austria and in the realm of international modernism around 1900, and many value them even more highly than they do his paintings. Klimt himself said little about his conception of art, and equally little about his working method. Drawing and painting were intimate and private matters for him, something he did not share even with his models or the society ladies he portrayed. Working in seclusion, the artist only occasionally received friends, acquaintances, or clients in his studio. Unlike the paintings, the drawings of Klimt's final years do not at first glance testify to his having been inspired by other artists or trends. But the excited lines in many of them, and the pencil strokes vehemently superimposed on one another do bear silent witness to the contemporaneous Expressionist movement. However, Klimt's graphic work is not driven by deep soul-searching, but rather by compliance with the higher order of the overall context. The later drawings are also governed by dialectic antitheses: sensuality versus spirituality, momentariness versus universality, turbulent line versus the limits imposed by the paper's dimensions. As before, this spirit of fusion gives voice to the aspiration of an ideal unity between art and life that was programmatically proclaimed at the Kunstschau of 1908: the transfiguring imperative of the historicist Gesamtkunstwerk connected with a thorough academic grounding in the art of drawing. In Max Eisler's words, Klimt's work "remained a celebration of unreality." In this very particular linkage of tradition and modernity, of the local and the universal, Klimt was unique in all Europe during his lifetime. Perhaps this fascinating contradictoriness was one of the reasons for his rediscovery decades later. Klimt's paintings undoubtedly enjoy greater popularity, but his drawings offer a much more differentiated and immediate revelation of the originality of his talent. We are grateful to Dr. Marian Bisanz-Prakken for her permission to reprint the present extract from the catalogue for the current exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada Gustav Klimt, Modernism in the Making. THE PROPERTY OF AN AUSTRIAN COLLECTOR

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918)

Stehender Akt mit langen Haaren nach links

細節

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918)
Stehender Akt mit langen Haaren nach links
signed 'Gustav Klimt' (lower right)
pencil on paper
22½ x 14¾in. (57 x 37.4cm.)
Executed circa 1917-18

來源

Acquired by the grandfather of the present owner and thence by descent.

出版

A. Strobl, Gustav Klimt. Die Zeichnungen, Vol. IV, Salzburg, 1989, no. 3724 (illustrated p. 205).

注意事項

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

拍品專文

The present work is one of a group of drawings relating to Klimt's late masterpiece Adam und Eva, 1917/18 (N. and D. no. 220; fig. 1), housed in the Österreichische Galerie im Belvedere, Vienna. The painting is unusual in Klimt's late oeuvre for its inclusion of a male figure. Female forms and archetypes dominated Klimt's late works and, as the finished related painting here suggests, the associated preliminary sketches favour Klimt's depiction of the nude woman. Another related drawing, today hanging in a private Austrian collection, tackles a similarly posed model, although from a viewpoint that is a little less fugitive (fig. 2).

Eve, as she is portrayed in the painting, has much in common with the present work. Klimt returned to the classicism of this pose at different times in his career, principally in association with his allegorical treatment of women. He experimented with degrees of torsion and frontality in the pose and with directness of the model's gaze, making slight adjustments each time. Here, with the hasty precision native to a master draughtsman, he has balanced the tension between denying and inviting a longer look.