Abstract

This essay presents a philosophical and psychoanalytical interpretation of the work of the Viennese Secession artist, Gustav Klimt. The manner of depiction in Klimt’s paintings underwent a radical shift around the turn of the twentieth century, and the author attempts to unveil the internal and external motivations that may have prompted and contributed to this transformation. Drawing from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy as well as Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, the article links Klimt’s early work with what may be referred to as the Apollonian or consciousness, and his later work with the Dionysian or the subconscious. It is then argued that the Beethoven Frieze of 1902 could be understood as a “self-portrait” of the artist and used to examine the shift in stylistic representation in Klimt’s oeuvre.

Highlights

  • This essay presents a philosophical and psychoanalytical interpretation of the work of the Viennese Secession artist, Gustav Klimt

  • The man the same figure for the Secessionist publication, Ver Saresponsible for both the poster design and for leading the crum). This tiny figure does not hold up a laurel wreath as revolutionary charge was Gustav Klimt, a man who in his her predecessor may have, but rather a mirror into which youth worked within the system he would eventually help modern man may gaze introspectively

  • We know little about Klimt’s personal life, who turned their classical associations on their head and and what we do know comes to us via the secondhand ac- who established new associations are significant in that counts of those that he worked and interacted with. We they fully embody the zeitgeist of the Secession: “Der Zeit must ask why Klimt underwent such a radical shift in ihre Kunst

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Summary

Introduction

This essay presents a philosophical and psychoanalytical interpretation of the work of the Viennese Secession artist, Gustav Klimt. Klimt would begin to break down those very illusions that sustained the Viennese conception of reality and allow the sentiment of the Dionysiac—not necessarily through its associations to music, but rather the suggestion of something intensely personal and subjective—to seep into and diffuse throughout the work of the modern period.

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