This style came later during the latter part of his ten years as member of the Wiener Sezesion. The objective of this association was to separate themselves from contemporary art and to provide Vienna with quality foreign art pieces. Klimt's pieces, at first, failed to win renown and only became accepted with his so-called 'Golden period' called so due to the generous use of gold leaf in his paintings.
Klimt's encounter with Byzantine art and his being influenced by it, primarily, initiated from Alfred Roller, a painter colleague who had a great influence on his life, and who had encouraged Klimt to visit Ravenna and study the famous mosaics there. Roller himself had studied them when painting friezes and mural for the Breitenfelder-Kirche. Accordingly, Klimt visited Ravenna the following spring and, taking Rollers advice, studied the mosaics. His companion, Max Lenz commented on the huge impact that the mosaics had on Klimt.
Gordon remarks that Klimt may have deliberately employed the Byzantine use of gold in his paintings -- particularly as 2-diemnstionsl background coverage surrounding his erotic figures -- in order to evoke the golden ground surrounding Byzantine art. In Byzantine art, such a technique is used in order to negate space hence time. Klimt may have adopted the same technique and intention with the idea of transposing the concept of loss of time in regards to the eternity of love. This can be particularly seen and felt in the famous painting of the kiss where only the faces and hands or the lovers are seen; their lack of self is lost in gold.
Similarly, the decision to imitate the Byzantium influence of painting image as surface could have been, too, to express the underlying emotion of the picture. With Byzantium art, 3-dimensionality was reduced to surface expression in order to express the spirituality of Christianity, whilst Klimt may have intended to adopt the same technique with the intention of allowing eroticism to protrude.
This can be clearly seen in the picture the Adele Bloch-Bauer of 1907 where the Adelle, clasping her hands, is dressed in gold is a gold-saturated...
Art Gustav Klimt was at the forefront of the flowering of artistic expression that characterized the early twentieth century. Globalization and cross-cultural encounters made Eastern themes fuse easily with Western ones. Klimt, like many of the Impressionist artists contemporary with him, drew themes, motifs, and painting techniques from Eastern art. The art of early Christianity and of the Byzantine Empire made an indelible stamp on Gustav Klimt, perhaps more than any
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