Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
November 2014
Zeit und Leben des Wiener Künstlers Gustav Klimt
Vienna. 1862.
An exceptional artist is born. Gustav Klimt. He gives birth to Modernism.
New York. 2012. A recently divorced woman facing the end of her forties. She gives birth to nothing. And no one. And fails. Because of the hardness of modern life.
150 years after his birth. And around a hundred years after his death. Gustav Klimt suddenly appears in a New York diner. And there meets the frustrated and recently divorced woman facing the end of her forties…
This biographic novel does not only illustrate the life and work of the exceptional artist Gustav Klimt (1862/1918) from Vienna, but it also draws a genre picture of a legendary era, the Belle Époque, that was destroyed by hail of bombs the of the First World War. While Klimt was considered scandalous and controversial during his time, because he drew erotic paintings, nowadays he is one of the best known and most popular artists of all.
After a childhood full of privation, Klimt starts a meteoric career as a decoration painter in the gorgeous buildings of the new Vienna Ring Road in the early 1880’s. After this he founds his own artist association, the Vienna Secession, as well as his own remarkable art style in 1897. As the first and only artist since the medieval times Klimt brings gold back into art and gets rid of perspective and shadows. Thereby he becomes the founding father of Modernism. His ambivalent relationships to women influence his work as much as Sigmund Freud’s theories, his foreign relations and his travels – to Munich, Berlin, Venice, Ravenna, Paris, Madrid, Toledo and London. Nevertheless during his lifetime he is considered a ‘pervert’ and a ‘drawing Freud’, because he connects his church art with extremely erotic motifs.
Klimt, the most misunderstood and hated artist in Vienna during the turn of the century, mainly surrounded himself with the most popular and most important artists and intellectuals of his time. Remarkable people of that time like Alma und Gustav Mahler, Auguste Rodin, Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Arthur Schnitzler, Karl Kraus, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Felix Salten, Ludwig Hevesi, Hans Makart, Emil Jacob Schindler, Franz Matsch, Carl Moll, Koloman Moser, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Emilie Flöge, Tina Blau, Bertha Zuckerkandl, Kaiserin Elisabeth, Kaiser Franz Joseph, etc. cross his path and have a date within this book.
