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Friday 5 December 2008

Seduced by Klimt

Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design & Modern Life in Vienna 1900 (Tate Liverpool until 31 August)

There’s a buzz of popular excitement in Tate Liverpool right now and in the entertaining second room of the exhibition I was surprised to bump into an old friend, an explorer of South America. ‘By the way, what’s that gorilla doing in there?’ he asked, while indicating a mysterious creature in Klimt’s ‘Beethoven Frieze’ originally painted for the Fourteenth Exhibition of the Viennese Secession in 1902. I can now reveal that this hirsute giant with bad teeth is Typhoeus, one of the Hostile Forces. He stands next to his daughters, the three Gorgons, looking rather ridiculous but not as ridiculous as the hero of the frieze, a very stiff looking Knight in Shining Armour. Oh dear! The whole mural has been recreated for this show — but out of architectural context. You have to look at photographs nearby to imagine what it looked like originally.

Klimt was part of a revolt against stuffy traditionalism, but he was a big enough artist and man to tolerate and even encourage the next generation of Viennese revolutionaries such as Schiele and Kokoschka. Kokoschka’s main patron was the radical architect Adolph Loos. Loos disliked Hofmann and thought that a true artist should pursue lofty aims far above interior decoration and furniture design. He was fundamentally right in the latter case but this does not mean that it was a bad idea to mount this show. It’s a show which brilliantly animates an engaging, extravagant and occasionally dotty slice of cultural history. It captures a world about to vanish — but not without trace.

More articles from: Mark Glazebrook | this section

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