Gustav Klimt Research Paper

Gustav Klimt is an Austrian painter known for his symbolist and Jugendstil art style. He was born July 14th, 1862 as the eldest son of a poor family, in which he had closer relationships with his mother and sisters. A majority of Klimt’s works consist of female figures either nude or fashionably clothed with many decorative elements as well as yonic symbols surrounding them to illustrate fertility and femininity. Klimt’s art style included influences of Japanese art, classical art, Egyptian art, and Italian Renaissance art. His interest in these styles as well as primitivism may allude to his fascination with painting and drawing females, more commonly the female nude, especially in account to the references of goddesses and fertility statuettes. Klimt maintained a long-term relationship with couturier by the name of Emilie Flöge. The

As Joss Bailey stated in defense of Klimt’s use of nude women in his paintings, “women is the vehicle, not the meaning behind the painting,” but in Patsch’s Klimt: Life and Art, she states, “the position of the woman as object was made very clear in such descriptions: “these female figures, who are more or less of the ionic-attic type, with sweeping shoulders and harrow hips, look themselves like works of art. . . . . created by an artist.” The women in Klimt’s paintings are not people, they are merely objects, [BETTER DESCRIPTION]. Patsch then states “many of Klimt’s nudes….display both the wish for unrepressed sexual expression and at the same time the regressive male image of woman as merely sexual creature of nature….” Klimt is still a male in the nineteenth century; he does not understand the perspective of women. To Klimt, women are there to be passive and are only used as symbolism for birth and fertility. This is even more present in Klimt’s drawings, which portray women in more of a sexual nature than