Gustav Klimt: Bauerngarten, 1907

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) was an Austrian Symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Art Nouveau movement. His major works include paintings, murals, sketches, and other art objects. Klimt's primary subject was the female body, and his works are marked by a frank eroticism. In 1876, Klimt was enrolled in the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, where he studied until 1883, and received training as an architectural painter. He began his professional career painting interior murals and ceilings in large public buildings.

Klimt's work is distinguished by the elegant gold or coloured decoration, often of a phallic shape that conceals the more erotic positions of the drawings upon which many of his paintings are based. Klimt travelled little, but trips to Venice and Ravenna, both famous for their beautiful mosaics, most likely inspired his gold technique and his Byzantine imagery.

Bauerngarten was painted in 1907, during the golden period of Klimt’s career. Although rooted in the natural world, it also reaches towards the symbolic, decorative avant-garde, and succeeds in combining natural beauty and regularity, therby creating a profoundly moving quality. The painting is regarded as one of Klimt's finest landscapes. First exhibited in Vienna in 1908, Joseph August Lux wrote of the work: ‘The flower meadows are even more beautiful since Klimt has painted them; the artist gives us an eye with which to see the radiant glory of their colours. We never learn to seize nature in her magical beauty other than through art, which always renews her appearance’.

the above text appears on the back of the card
HC-672:  6" x 6" (150mm x 150mm)