Hi folks welcome we’ll get started in another couple moments to let folks hop on welcome welcome everybody all right everyone hello and welcome my name is Gian I’m one of the reference Librarians here at the chelsford public library and thank you all so much for joining us for tonight’s art on
Thursdays presents All That Glitters Is Gold Gustaf climp Austrian painter Gustaf climp is associated with a number of artist movements including art Nuvo and symbolism but in the end he developed a distinctive style all his own this program introduces audiences to the idiosyncratic artist and reviews his
Famous gold paintings as well as his lesser-known Works to introduce our presenter tonight we have Jane O’Neal who is the founder of culturally curious an Arts education consulting firm specializing in art appreciation programs she curates and delivers programs throughout New England and Beyond O’Neal holds a MERS in art
History from Boston University and a Masters in Education from Harvard University born and raised in New Hampshire she has worked at some of the state’s most esteemed cultural institutions including the league of New Hampshire Craftsman where she served as executive director and The Courier Museum of Art where she held the role of
Senior educator Jane has also taught at the college level for more than a decade most recently at Southern New Hampshire University and for more information I will link this down below in the chat um please visit IM culturally curious.com speaking of the chat any questions or comments you have throughout the
Presentation tonight just please feel free to pop those in the chat or the Q&A section in your Zoom menus at the bottom of your screen and without further Ado I’m gonna hand it over to Jane thank you so much gaan and thank you everybody for taking time out of your day and your
Busy holidays to learn a little bit more about Gustav climp somehow the gold just felt right for this time of year and so I’m glad you agreed and um and showed up tonight so um so tonight we’ll be looking at this artist whose work really
Will take us um sort of out of the traditions of the 1800s or I’m sorry the 1900s and sort of giving way to the progress and modernity of of the the 1900s of the 20th century uh as was mentioned in the program description Clint is oftentimes categorized as a
Symbolist artist or an art nuo artist he was both of those things and more I’ll try to point out some of those characteristics along the way in the end he really kind of developed a style that was all his own and really nobody has has attempted to emulate it to the same
Degree of uh um as as the peak of his career this gold period that we’ll be looking at so you probably already know that Clem’s primary subject was the female body he painted it he drew it um he was fascinated by it and his works are marked by this sensuality and
Oftentimes eroticism we will see that that gets him into a lot of trouble along the way so let me give you a sense in terms of how we’ll spend this hour together um we are going to start off with The Life and Times really The Early times of Gustav Clint and then we’ll
Talk a little bit about his role in the Vienna secession and a few scandals that he uh uh encountered or maybe encouraged before um he arrived at the Gold period which I think most people are are sort of best familiar with uh when it comes
To his body of work and then we’ll wrap up with his death and Legacy when I put this whole program together it was about a hundred slides and I had to edit it down and I I regret to say that I had to take out his Landscapes so um his
Landscapes are magical in their own right we are looking at a painting called the Birch forest from 1903 it sounds like I might need to do a ghostav Clint part two at some point because the Landscapes are are wonderful but let’s get started with The Life and Times of
Gustav climp all right we’ve got our map here we’ve got a little image of uh Vienna Austria from about 1890 and the map here is to just uh give you a sense in terms of where he was in the world he was born in 1862 and uh Born Into the uh the
Austrian Hungarian Empire so Vienna was really one of the biggest cities in the Empire and he was born just outside of it sort of like a country bumpkin to be honest he was out in the Hinterlands and he came from um well we’ll get we’ll get
A little bit more into his background in just a moment but what I really wanted to emphasize with this slide with this image of of what Austrian life looked like at the time was really um how unique Vienna was in all of Europe really it was the least industrialized
City um in Europe uh right around the turn of the century so in some ways it was sort of backwards um it was a very conservative environment conservative politically artistically it socially it was not a a place that really welcomed or encouraged change it was also this fascinating Crossroads for major figures
Of the 20th century so while Gustav climp is there you know Hitler comes through and of course Sigman frud was born there and lived there his whole life of you even have Leon trosky coming through too so all of these uh major thinkers are kind of drawn to this area
Of course it’s like a an important Nexus point during World War II so we’ll kind of talk about the afterlife of some of these paintings as we go along but I just wanted to reinforce this idea that Gustav climp was working in an environment that was not necessarily conducive to um to
Risk-taking to uh to different modes of thought and I think that will make him and his work all the more remarkable as we go along so as I mentioned here he is in in um as a young man he was born outside of Vienna in 1862 he was one of
Seven children and they were essentially impoverished he and his two brothers both went into the Arts and probably the reason behind that was because their father was a gold engraver yes gold so gold factors into his life very early on and I’m sure there was some sort of
Interest in the Arts that was sort of instilled by his father so gustab Clint at the age of 14 won a full scholarship to art school and as we’ll see it it’s becomes very clear that he studied and worked very hard while he was there so
Um so right after after he graduates he and one of his brothers and a friend of their so this is uh Gustav Clint here this is his brother gor and this is their friend uh fron match uh they formed a business called a company of artists and they uh they begin to
Receive some commissions all around Vienna uh Gustav climp had sort of specialized in architectural decoration so he was really interested in kind of unifying a space into a total work of art and then this little company that they have scores the ultimate commission and this is only about 3 to five years
After he graduates from art school they get this unparalleled opportunity at the Berg theater in Austria and so we’re looking at this magnificent building where you know really the upper echelon of society gathers um so it’s a building itself that’s already in the the Limelight and then you’re getting your
Artwork in front of uh you know possible customers so these three young artists get this opportunity and they are commissioned to paint murals on the ceilings of both of these uh kind of axial wings of the building and I wanted to give you a a quick Glimpse in terms
Of what this early work looked like because we’ll see the seed for some of his um his interests later on but we’ll also see that he starts in a pretty conservative vein of painting so let’s go inside we’re going to see the SE sort of a Florida ceiling on one side and
Just the ceiling of the other uh with this next slide here so you can see that those giant wings are really just a giant staircase and that we see there’s very elaborate decoration on the ceilings in both of these spaces now the um the organizing principle for these
Murals that they painted and I call them murals but I believe that they are oil paintings on canvas that were then affixed to the ceiling I don’t think he was up there painting on scaffolding like Michelangelo so the organizing principle here was the the evolution of
Theater and one of the uh one of several paintings that Gustav climp was responsible for for this commission was this tonum over here on the left it’s like this little almost like a half moon shaped uh painting and we zero in on it here and the subject is the altar of
Dionis so the god of wine he everything sort of gets started with getting drunk I guess that’s the origin of theater right so we see already Gustav is painting um a sort of beautiful nude women sort of luxuriating here but these are classicized nudes these are kind of
Safe nudes in the history of art notice that these nudes have no body hair body hair will become a major issue in Gustav kimp’s uh body of work but they are sort of um well they’re they they’re luxurious they’re um they they sort of bring you into this picture as we zoom
In just a little bit closer we can see that this woman here is holding an offering to this bust a golden bust of dionisis and the offering here is a little figurine of Palace Athena or the goddess of wisdom so um we’ll see a couple of different versions of the
Goddess of wisdom kind of come up again in Gustav kimp’s work so we already have the gold we have the the naked ladies and Palace AA very quickly I just wanted to show you one other major painting that he um worked on as part of this commit
And I think it will help you see just I mean how well educated he was uh when he went to art school so this is his depiction of the Globe Theater in London remember the whole uh cycle is about the evolution of theater and so if we look
Over here on the stage we can see this is the suicide scene at the end of Romeo and Juliet he’s also suggesting that the Virgin Queen herself is sitting right there on the stage in like this place of honor now there are some things that he
Got wrong I I guess um Queen Elizabeth never sat uh on the stage she had a better seat we all we can also see that there are very well-dressed figures with like these rough collars uh right there in the front of course if you know anything about Shakespeare that’s where
The Groundlings were and they weren’t that well-dressed but these figures bring our eyes back to the crowd in the distance and if we zoom in on them we can see a self-portrait by Gustav climp wearing Elizabethan dress this is his brother just behind him and this is their colleague France match so he’s
Included all of the artists who are working on this commission right here in the painting it’s said that um several other uh Clint family members are depicted there too now interestingly Gustav climp said he never painted a self-portrait he said and I quote I never painted a self-portrait I am less
Interested in myself as a subject for painting than I am in other people above all women so let’s turn our attention to Gustav climp and women prepare to pick your jaw up off the floor are you ready okay so Gustav climp we are looking at two different views of his Studio Gustav
Climp lived with his mother and his unmarried sisters his entire life but he did rent a studio and this is where he sort of had his privacy you’ll notice in this studio that there is a bed and I don’t think I’ve ever seen another Stu artist studio arranged this way so in
This studio space this is where Gustav climp um would pay for models to come and these models would oftentimes become his Mistresses and so he um had these very discreet affairs with many women and it is said that heathered 14 children with various women out of
Wedlock over the course of his life so we now know obviously apostu usly that he had these very strong sex sexual appetites and his his Studio space sort of afforded him this opportunity to indulge that way now you might be thinking 14 kids like how do this all
Work apparently he was um invested in them at least around the time that they were young he became very wealthy as an artist and we know that he did spend money to support them he would write letters inquiring how some of these kids were doing but um for the most part the
The person he was most attached to in his life was this young woman here and her name was Emily FL Emily Flo this is a portrait of her done when she was 18 years old the year that Gustav climp met her he was six years older than her he
Met Emily Flo um because she was the sister of the woman that Gustav Kim’s brother was marrying so essentially she’s his sister-in-law and from that developed what is said to have at first at first um at least at least at first have been some sort of real infatuation with her
That maybe kind of cooled down to a close friendship um in fact these two became lifelong companions they vacationed together they attended important events together and as we’ll see they even collaborated professionally because Emily Flo grows up to become a fashion designer and here are two views of her wearing one of her
Own designs and so here we are coming out of buttoned up Primm and proper Victorian Vienna and here’s Emily Flo doing um what what is essentially like this is the first wave of Fe feminism this is Victorian dress reform it’s getting rid of corsets it’s like these flowing gowns that are much more
Comfortable to wear and really interesting to look at she was very successful at this she and her sisters ran a Couture um fashion uh uh store in Vienna for 30 years so she was was a great designer and a great businesswoman so sometimes she and and Gustav climp
Would even collaborate too so um they they were interested in the same things professionally oftentimes Flo would dress the women that that um Gustav climp would later undress but um dress the women that he was painting and um and and we can see that she also
Functioned as a model and amuse to the artist too this is a portrait that he did of her in 1902 and we can see we’ve come a long way from the Berg theater already um we’re we’re not as interested in creating an image that that looks um uh incredibly three-dimensional here
Because certainly this fantastic dress that Emily Flo is wearing here that we see in full length three4 profile this is a dress that that sort of functions to kind of flatten out the whole picture we don’t even see her curves per se that’s part of the dress design but the
Pattern here tends to to flatten out the picture there’s also this incredible collar behind her head there’s this um there’s this wonderful confrontation in her expression and we can see how her skin her face her flesh really pops out against the abstract patterning of this gown incidentally her mother hated this
Portrait um but but we can see that perhaps there’s some cross pollination between Flo and climp here now Gustav climp himself had very interesting clothing choices here he is wearing one of his signature cfans and he would wear this not just for work he would wear it a lot of the
Time this is a man who was trying to tell the world that he rejected Bourgeois expectations right and and values really this is this kind of unadorned Spartan look you know I mean it’s essentially a bag it’s a sack um apparently he did oftentimes wear this
While he was painting and it was fairly well known that he wore nothing underneath it which is probably the reason that he had so many children but um people think of him engaged in the creative act of painting for the most part when they think of him
In these C Dan um a few of them are still preserved in museum Collections and um and because uh uh he was he he he painted in them they are really thought to have this kind of Aura to them now like these special calf Dan they are
They’re famous in their own right as his signature look now here’s Just One Last glimpse of him and Emily Flo you can tell that they’re just two pe’s in a pod here Captain modern dresses there are nearly 400 surviving letters from Gustav climp to Emily Flo and he hated to write
Letters um but those letters really uh attest to this intimate and intellectually stimulating friendship that they had it’s um it’s really impossible to say if if their relationship was ever consummated but it does just seem to be a friendship uh now in terms of Gustav kimp’s attachments he
Was also known to be very attached to his pets and he had I think it’s safe to say dozens of cats so here he is in a famous photograph wearing one of the calf danss with a cat here and the cat is appropriately named cats k a TZ um
There’s a famous story of an art critic going to his studio um to interview him and in that room alone there were like 10 different cats and they’re like fighting with each other and shredding up his his studies and that sort of thing and Gustav Clint apparently said
Something pretty strange to that critic about these cats he said their urine makes great fixative so he was okay with the smell he was okay with the cats um it becomes part of the lore of Gustav clim so we wrap up on him with just a
Couple of Big Ideas here he was um an immensely talented and successful painter who did not follow the norm um throughout his life his choices as we’ll see bring him great success he’s born into poverty and by the you know by the height of his career he’s making t 10
Times uh what a a school teacher might make in an entire year by selling just one painting so he very successful so tonight we’ll learn a little bit more about his body of work and how um like I said he oftentimes brushed up against a great deal of Scandal because of these
Passionate ideas that he had and these very Progressive and modern ideas so let’s turn our attention to Scandal and secession here now just after the Bird Theater commission Gustav climp is like rolling in in the dough rolling in the commissions everybody who saw his his contributions to the Bird Theater once a
Portrait done and we can see in the 1890s that he is producing um realistic portraits strikingly realistic portraits I love this image of the woman over here on the right I feel like she’s right there in the room with me judging me slightly but beyond the realism of these
Works I want to draw attention to the backgrounds in both of them because over on the left we can see like the the edge of a tapestry maybe but we get this kind of geometric flat abstraction here maybe a little bit of gold and in the background over here once again this
Kind of modern floral Motif slightly abstracted and once again in the gold so we see this interest in Gold kind of popping out even early on now at the same time that he’s producing portraits like this something in his life very much liberates him so he’s already
Already met Emily Flo he’s being you know they’re they’re sort of um um sharing ideas but at this time his brother who he had worked with at the Berg theater and his father pass away and it sort of just opens up possibilities for Gustav Clint and he
Begins to explore um artistically in a way that he he never had before um unfortunately he was also then tasked with supporting his mother’s family and his brother’s family so luckily he becomes incredibly successful with these uh with these Brave choices that he’s making so one of the things that he does
During the 1890s towards the end of the decade is he is involved with a movement called the Vienna secession and to boil it down in the most simple terms essentially this is a group of of artists U more U avantgard artists who are rejecting the the conservative nature of the artistic establishment in
Vienna so they secede from them and say we’re going to do our own thing because we are embracing you know creativity and um and avanguard movements so Gustav Clint all of a sudden becomes the president of this movement and I love this Photograph over here on the left
Because we can see that these members of the Vienna secession still look pretty buttoned up and prim and proper but then you have Gustav climp sitting over here looking a mess wearing a c at this point he’s already internationally known as an artist but he wasn’t somebody who was um
Especially social like I said he had this kind of private life in his studio with these women um and he wasn’t like out at cafes with other artists like debating philosophy or anything like that but he is at the head of this particular movement on the right we can
See uh sort of the permanent building for the Vienna secession movement and it’s a strikingly modern building it sort of reminds me a little bit of Frank lyd Wright before uh Frank lyd Wright this was built in 1898 the architect is Joseph Maria albre and it’s hard to see
But there is text over the door that translates to to every age its art to every art its freedom and what’s most important about this building is that it was the first dedicated permanent exhibition space for contemporary artart of all types so painting and sculpture graphic arts decorative Arts it all came
Together here in the entire West which is kind of amazing so it just it it gave physical form and a geographic space to this movement and this kind of narrowing down that that distance between sort of the Fine Arts and and the decorative Arts so this idea of creating a total
Work of art that originated by painting architecture it all kind of comes together very nicely here but what’s important to know is that from the Berg theater to the Vienna secession that’s like the space of a decade uh Gustav climp goes from being really like a pillar of the establishment to the hero
Of the Avant guard and I think in part it’s because of Emily Flo in this New Freedom that you know the members of the male members of his family these other artists um they weren’t necessarily judging him he is living his own life at this point so I wanted to quickly show
You two um versions of a post poster that he made for the Vienna secessions first exhibition and right off the bat we can see a another Palace Athena another goddess of wisdom here and notice how she is juxtaposed to this Blank Space it almost looks like a blank
Wall here with a Cornus on top and that sort of reminds me of the building that we were just looking at but this is a very modern composition just allowing for this blank white space to serve uh this purpose creating this this tension with the margins in the top of the
Picture at the top we have another classical um reference here this is thesis fighting the minur so even though they’re for the Avant guard even though they’re for modernity it’s not that they’re rejecting the past they’re just interpreting it in new ways and you’ve probably already discovered what’s
Different about these two works and it is that thesis’s body has been censored um the Vienna sensors actually said you have to put a few trees strategically placed over thesis’s body here so of course this is the sort of thing that just incenses Gustav Clint and presumably the other members of the
Vienna secession because they’re here for artistic Freedom so let me introduce you to um the first of many great climp paintings here and we’ll see along the way that so many of them have a lot of gold in them even before we get to the gold period proper so this is a painting
That is all about cl’s favorite subject the female nude so this is a tall skinny painting in real life and then this is just a detail of her face over here so this is called nude Veritas it’s from 1899 this is a work that’s sort of done
In response to that sensoring that we just talked about so nude varit Tas The Naked Truth this is symbolism in art and notice the text here this font that he’s using this is all very and even like this ethereal red head with the long hair this is all very art Novo um even
These um kind of abstracted golden and tendrils behind her these are the forms of the art Nuvo so he’s integrating all of these things but he’s finding his voice in it too so um so the Naked Truth what is the Naked Truth well it’s this beautiful woman and she is alluring and
She’s looking out directly seeming like directly at us or through us with this eternal gaze she’s got these beautiful daisies in her hair she’s actually holding up a mirror if you’re wondering what that is but um The Naked Truth is also a little bit dangerous he painted
The snake down here kind of coiling around her her um her ankles of course anybody who doesn’t sugar sugarcoat the truth probably knows that um that the Naked Truth can be very dangerous and then um and then the the big element here that just scandalized all of Vienna
Was that Gustav clim included her body hair here and this was just something that was not done it was so over the toop I mean you can imagine today too I mean people would still kind of rest respond strongly if there was like a big
Award show and and a woman had um lots of visible body hair in the same way but people in Vienna around the turn of the century really just couldn’t handle this it was way too much for them um the text here is from a German poet named
Schiller and it translates to if you cannot please everyone with your actions and your art you should satisfy a few to please many is dangerous all right well we’re going to continue continue on with this theme of naked redheads with this next work which is called hope one from
1903 so we’ve headed into the um to the 20th century now this is the fulllength painting over here on the right this is just a crazy detail of this painting here so once again we’re looking at a female nude this time with a big swollen pregnant belly that we see in profile to
Emphasize that swollen belly and once again this is something that just did not happen in art before G St claim when’s the last time you saw a naked female nude in art I mean we were customed seeing pictures of maybe Mary pregnant but she was never naked so this
Was considered an affront um also she has visible body hair too and so once again this was considered a scandal this was considered pornographic um this was uh uh we know who the model was for this particular painting her name was herma and um one of she was one of Gustav Kim’s favorite
Bottles he was quoted as saying as describing her as having a backside more beautiful and more intelligent than the faces of many other models so clearly he cared for her but there’s no um evidence to say that this was his child that she was carrying so you so she has her hands
Kind of crossed over the top of her belly sort of close to her heart and she’s looking out at us sort of up and out at us this direct gaze she has little flowers in her red hair too and there is um there’s a sense of hesitancy
Here but also maybe like a little bit of confidence too because she has turned her head away from all of these terrifying things behind her and so let’s look at these faces for a moment because they are terrifying this is supposed to be disease this is old age
The skull of course is death and then this creeper over here is madness and she is rejecting that hope means um you know with with the promise of life within that all that you turn away from that and just imagine the best possible outcomes now you might also be wondering
What is this big black blob here this is actually supposed to be a sea monster apparently these are its eyes these are its teeth and then sort of swirls around her sort of like that serpent that we saw in the last image and it even seems
To have these claws those claw the form of those claws are echoed over here in this blue element almost as though they’re kind of uh um moving towards her pelvic area so the threat to that new life and probably the idea for this picture came from the fact that Gustav
Clim had at this point already lost one of his children um this is a postumus portrait that he created of his son Otto Just the year before so um so clearly this idea of the vulnerability of new life was already on his mind and and
This Woman’s uh figure was a way for him to kind of explore those feelings that he was having now one last well two last great scandals as we wrap up this section here uh Gustav climp and his former colleague France match were invited to do a series of murals at the
University of Vienna another major commission they got this commission at the end of the 19th century and it sort of stretched out um into the the first few years of the 20th century and once again they were painting oils that were uh oils on canvases that would have then
Been a fixed to the ceiling so he did a few panels for the cycle of murals and they were exhibited and once again people lost their minds over these pictures and I have to say I I think out of all of his pictures these are probably the most scandalous so he was
Assigned a couple of like high-minded ideals he was going to paint philosophy he was going to paint medicine he was going to paint Juris prudence and if I asked you to guess like what is this a painting of you might be struggling to think this is in fact medicine um we’ve
Got this wonderful woman in um sort of D drenched and draped in gold down below with the snake in her hand um sort of a nice reference to like symbols for medicine but beyond that it’s just like a sea of naked bodies this red head over
Here with the really long hair sort of thrusting her pelvis out at us again all this visible body hair and the rest of this almost just looks like an orgy it’s really hard to to make out what’s happening here and so people said this is straight up pornography I mean there
Was such a rejection of this that these paintings never even made it to the ceiling and this is just his painting for medicine so there’s also the other two that he did um and sadly none of them exists to this day because uh they were being stored in a different
Building and as the Nazis were leaving Austria in 1945 they set fire to that building so um so this is like the best reproduction we have here so uh gusta climp you know he comes out of this Scandal he’s kind of licking his wounds but he’s ready to kind of thumb his nose
At the vion society really and he does so with this painting he does a lot of kind of erotic images of women as like sea serpents lots of women kind of swimming around with their hair flowing in this art Novo style but this particular image he called um originally
To my critics um this was painted in around 1902 and the idea here is we just see This Woman’s bare backside she’s sort of laughing over her shoulder at us so it’s a way to say you know Screw you to your critics um eventually he changed
The name to the Goldfish just to kind of soften it I guess so the goldfish is going to be our segue into the gold period proper and this is like the culmination of his career so this is a luminous period that lasts for about a decade there are no hard and fast like
Beginnings or ends to this um because as we’ve seen we there’s already like a little bit of gold slipping into his painting early on um but these paintings that we are going to be looking at are some of the best known paintings in the world and some of the most expensive
Paintings in the world so this guy out there wearing a c just rejecting mod um uh well rejecting Society these views of how he should act he’s doing something pretty remarkable now this first image I’m going to show you is not a Gustav climp but it is something that greatly
Inspired him uh right around 1903 he um he took a couple of trips to Italy he went to Venice and he went to Rena and in those places he got to see Byzantine mosaics like we see here so mosaics just being these tiny colored glass tiles um
And the formation of a picture just out of like using these tiles as like pixels here and the gold obviously made an impression once again these kind of Eternal stairs that he’s already interested in the the decoration the flatness all of this has a huge um
Impact on gustab Clint so comes out of of an experience like that and he’s creating works that look like this these are two paintings that once again sort of bridge that that um that that hurdle of like the 20th century so on the left we have Palace Athena once again this
Like the third time we’ve seen her this dates to 1898 it’s generally considered his first official gold painting and then after that we uh we’ll get to his depiction of Judith and Halla feres which dates to 1901 so there’s just about three years here so let’s start
Off with Palace Athena just for a second so there’s plenty of gold here with the helmet with this kind of stylized armor that kind of flattens out her body with the spear that she’s holding and in some ways she looks almost androgynous right but she’s got this eternal gaze as well
Maybe more of a a piercing stare she is holding a tiny figurine of um of Nike or Victory so that makes sense in terms of of of Athena at War there’s an abstracted battle scene unfolding in the background it’s a little bit hard to make out but um an extension of this
Armor we can see kind of creating a flattened Motif back there as well uh notice how her arm is kind of out to the side like this almost in like a position where you might be like flexing a bicep this is a position of strength certainly
Notice how when we look over at Judith it’s almost the opposite of that right but with um with palis Athena we have a figure who is um is is strong we have a figure who’s a little bit androgynous although we do see this long hair here
So the gold is there let’s turn our attention to what happens when we get to the 20th century with Judith and hall ofes now Judith is of course a Biblical figure that has been a um a favorite for many artists over the centuries Judith is um a a woman who essentially saves
Her people by seducing the head of the army that was laying Siege to her people so she finds his tent she seduces him and then of course beheads him and there is that head um and in Gustav kimp’s version of Judith and Hall ofes she is still stuck in the seduction phase right
There’s no evidence of a Grizzly murder here at all um she’s still um looking very sultry for all the world so she’s got these like heavy hooded eyes they’re almost closed her her lips are parted here and of course her breasts are exposed well we can see one and then the
Other one is visible through this transparent drapery that she’s wearing um there’s such an emphatic flatness to this picture with the stylized flat uh uh gold background here and then even the stylized gold patterning on her clothes that it it always makes me feel like she’s lying in bed like we are
Looking down at her which kind of fits in with this sultry vibe that she’s got so she’s wearing a very tall necklace here and we’ll see that that is the style in Vienna at the time also the way her hair is arranged is on this big pile
Of of of hair on top of her head that was a modern day style too so here she is supposed to this biblical heroin but there’s all these things that kind of pull her in to the present making this um a really unusual depiction of Judith
Now we saw before that in the 1890s Clint was uh creating these realist portraits but with a little bit of abstraction uh once he gets into his gold period it’s it’s almost like the reverse a little bit of realism a lot of abstraction and this wild painting over
Here on the right is like the missing link for him and and and the gold period This is a 1906 portrait of a woman named frza readler and it’s at the belvadere Museum in um in Austria I believe she was a 46y old woman we don’t know much
About her there isn’t a photograph of her that exists to this day but we get the sense that um that her face is painting painted very naturalistically and her eyes are drawn to her face certainly because it almost looks like there’s like it’s surrounded by a mosaic
Um and then there’s like that repeated pattern over here and then little pieces um sort of floating in the back wall that look like a mosaic it draws our eye right in let’s kind of zoom in there we’ve got a mosaic for comparison um we’re gonna get a little bit closer to
Frza readler actually so that we can see how Gustav climp painted that geometric abstraction that seems to be framing her face I love this geometric abstraction on its own I love those colors I love the forms and it’s such a striking juxtoposition from the realism of her
Face uh it and really like nothing like this had ever been done before uh there are art historians that think that this form that is framing her is sort of reminiscent of um some Egyptian Styles and even some Baroque Era ways that royalty would uh wear their hair that
That Gustav Clint might have seen at local museums but let’s face it I mean his interpretation of this is all his own so it almost seems like we have this tight compact Mosaic here surrounding her head and then there are elements of it that have just kind of uh broken free
We’ve got like this loose constellation of of uh these blue and white Mosaic tiles on this back wall now in addition to that she is sitting in a three4 profile in this armchair that is dense with this patterning and he’s done something unusual with this armchair uh
Even though it’s at a three4 profile he is not attempting to create the illusion of foreshortening in the way he’s arranged that pattern so the whole chair reads as flat to our eyes and this is important as we move through the gold period and of course some art historians
Think that the little U Motif that he’s using here is um is one that can be uh connected back to um to like an erotic reading like that it has something to do with female anatomy but I mean whether or not you accept something like that it
The patterning of it is so important here now this brings us to the gold there’s this stripe of gold down the edge of this painting and notice that he draws a line through it we’ve get like two tones of gold and that line really corresponds to her head right here so
We’ve got this kind of wonderful organization in the painting and then we’ve got this sort of orange background and then a little bit of relief from all these warm colors with this blue carpet down at her feet and now of course you have to acknowledge this dress that
She’s wearing um this uh Wild Wonderful multi-tiered uh uh gown that she’s in with these silk or satin elements here the bows around her it certainly looks like something that Emily Flo would wear or even designed so perhaps in this case it was another um collaboration between
Artist and his friend and Muse so frza readler is like the painting that helps us understand how we get to the woman in Gold how we get to the portrait of Adele blower one which is of course one of the most famous paintings in the world this is a work that he um
That that he painted uh around 1907 and this is a photograph of his subject Adele block Bower from right around that time so we can see that he’s really captured this kind of ethereal look to her face these heavy lited eyes that do that that she um apparently
Frequently wore and then we see you know these little elements this little peak of her flesh but also the the very elaborate jewelry as well now interestingly okay before before I get to uh a little bit more about Adele block Bower just the a few statistics here this painting of Adele block Bower
Is rather Grand in scale it’s about 4 and 1/2 fet by 4 and 1/2 fet and this is gold this is gold leaf there’s even some silver in this painting but um but the gold leaf these very thin um sheets of gold have been applied to this painting
And he’s also painting in oil over the the gold so um so it’s a it’s a strange thing to do right I mean in the history of art the only time artists have ever created an image like this was to create an image of a religious icon to create
The the uh the image of of the Divine and gold signified a heaven otherworldly background and a person who’s standing in front of this kind of gold was a saint it was somebody that you should worship so what a format to steal to update for the modern era all
Right so we’re gonna we’re gonna dive into this a little bit more closely I it is worth noting that uh Adele blower was also the model for the Judith painting that we saw before um and you might be wondering okay so was there a relationship there with Clint because
Obviously she was in very very states of undress around him well we do know that she was married it was her husband that paid for this portrait so um so I tend to think that there there wasn’t necessarily an affair there I there’s no Affair documented I should say so um but
There is this sort of long-standing relationship over several years now Gustav climp spent more time or created more sketches for this portrait of Adele BL Bower than any other work that he ever made so it it is a breakthrough work for him this is just one of those
Sketch which I find so interesting because in this imagining of this portrait of her I mean it’s still based in realism it’s still based on the woman that he sees across the room sitting in a chair and obviously he breaks free from that and he and he discovers
Something totally novel here so let’s focus for a moment on this portrait of Adele blower um maybe you never even noticed that she is also sitting in an armchair like frza rler who we just saw before here are the edges of that armchair so um and that swirling pattern
Is seen over here once again and even up here at the top it’s hard to see that she’s sitting her body doesn’t look like she’s sitting but she is enthroned um the gold pattern all of this flat gold patterning makes um makes the picture seem very flat and sometimes it makes it
Hard to understand the Contours and the edges of things some things are clear we see that she’s wearing this elaborately patterned gown um and it at first it might look like she’s got this very skinny very SC small silhouette here but then you see that there’s like this
Swirling Cape that goes around it as well so uh we’re just kind of glimpsing the inner dress and then the Outer Cape here and then we have these decorative straps um a fun detail is that her initials are painted into the cape so here’s an a here’s a b there’s a lot of
Be’s here’s another a and some be’s over here a d block Bower um right there of course the the inner dress here has almost like a an ancient Greek evil eye Motif to it an art historian sort of see other suggestions of female anatomy and
Some of the uh U other decoration on her dress so as we move a little bit further up the canvas there there’s um there’s a lot of confusion here I think um but we can see that he is drawing our eyes towards her face in much the same way
That he did with FR of redler there’s this oval behind her maybe it’s like an elaborate collar to her dress maybe it’s just something that he’s dreamed up inside the oval are more ovals there’s like black and gold and um and silver and blue it these are just lovely colors
And and so we don’t quite know is it real is it imagined those ovals give way to tiny little golden squares and big golden and red and and gray squares over here it’s just hard to know exactly what what these elements of the picture are but it provides this kind of visual
Splendor here and then there’s this wonderful counterbalance of just this one square over here that’s practically the same color as her very pale flesh down below we get this one little breath of green away from all of this gold and if we hadn’t seen frza readler before
With that little breath of blue I would have just interpreted this as a very flat wall but now we see she’s in an armchair there she’s in a room probably um even though this is a picture that seems otherworldly and emphatically flat there are some elements of it that are
Kind of grounded in realism now another detail that I love just because you know I work in Powerpoints and with the PowerPoint grid you can kind of see how an artist imagines a whole picture so the center line the axis of this picture actually runs along this bent arm of
Hers and that bent the bent elbow and the bent wrist so all of her flesh is just kind of contained in this upper right quadrant there and then the rest of it is just is given over to all of this stylized drapery and patterning here now these two Works were exhibited together in
1907 and there was a very negative reaction to it uh they were described as Mosaic like wall grotesqueries bizarre absurdities vulgarities and one critic even quipped that Adele blower one um was more like was more black than BL which apparently the black translates to Brass so she’s not all golden she’s more
Brass um nice little play on words there now there is an afterlife to this painting that I think is just so incredible and I’m sure most of you have heard it before uh Adele blower um passed away this painting stayed in her family and then when the Nazis invaded
Austria um they they were stealing artwork um that was part of their military campaign and this painting was taken right off of the Walls by the Nazis um out of the home of of the block Bowers and then uh put in this Museum called The badier Gallery in Austria um
That’s what the Nazis did with this painting they actually tried to um tried to distance this this uh the the Jewish identity of of the sitter here by renaming the work the woman in gold or the Dame in Gold the lady in gold and that’s how she was known and that’s
Where she existed for about half a century and during that time she became the face of Austria she became the favorite painting of Austria she was the Mona Lisa of Austria there was a Barbie doll of her but in fact U the Nazis did not abide by well the Nazis stole the
Painting and so the rightful heir of the painting this niece of Adele blower a Woman by the name of Maria Altman right around the year 2000 decided she was going to fight to have this painting and several other climed paintings that were in her family’s collection restored to
Her it was a seven-year-long legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court and eventually Maria Alman won these pictures back can you imagine like the French State ever like giving away the mon that this was a hardfought battle and when she got these paintings back she auctioned off several including
Um including the woman in gold which went for well she sold it I should say it went for a record price at the time of $135 million she sold this painting to the son of Estee Lauder who was a businessman and art collector with on the condition that this painting always
Be on public view so it’s at the new Gallery in New York City you can still go and see it um part of the fame around this case and the woman in Gold um is is the fact that other Clint paintings that were were part of that restitution
Including the portrait of Odell blower 2 also by Gustav um was also sold and the person who bought it in 2006 was Oprah Winfrey she bought the second portrait of Adel block power for $88 million and then Oprah just sat on this painting for about 10 years she would loan it out to
Other museums and that sort of thing and then she decided to sell it in 2017 and she earned an additional $60 million off of that sale so this painting was was sold in 2017 for about $150 million dollar and of course all of that Fame is really goes back to I think
The the golden painting which is probably I’m sure valued way more than that these days so a fascinating kind of afterlife to um to the portrait of Adele blower but we have it I would be remiss if we didn’t talk about this painting in in Gustav Clemson pool period one of the
Most famous paintings on the planet this is known as the kiss but it was called the lovers from 1907 to 1908 this is still in Austria we all have to plan our bucket list trips to Austria now um this is a painting that just gleams with all
Of this applied gold leaf and you can see like the individual squares and rectangles of gold leaf that have been applied here um it gives it this this Aura of majesty and preciousness the son of the golden Graver of course knew that when you make something gold it makes it
A cherished object um and this is a cherished object this is a shining Testament to the very notion of romantic love I always joke this is the poster that is in like half of all college campus uh dorm rooms all over the world so what we see here of course is an
Embracing couple they’re both wearing golden robes but it also seems like there is this golden envelope that um that encompasses them and their loves their robes are distinct from each other once again you could sort of read into like some erotic imagery in here that he is wearing this gold that’s covered with
Erect um rectangles here in in gray and white and black and her robes um have this kind of oval Motif that sort of looks like flowers there’s also Flowers in her hair and um Laurels uh he’s wearing a crown of laurels here too now um they are they’re sort of tightly
Twine here he bends over the woman sort of cupping her face to kiss the side of her cheek and she maybe Intoxicated by her companion at this moment maybe this is the the throws of ecstasy she seems as though she might be like leaning into this loving Embrace with one arm wrapped
Around his neck up here as we can see and they are kneeling together in um in this field of flowers and the fact that they’re kneeling art historians love that they love to sort of suggest that these two have just consummated their love but I I want to draw your attention
To the fact that they are on the edge of a cliff they’re on the edge of this precipice in fact her feet are kind of hooked over the edge of it and her toes are digging in here what does that mean what would it mean if they were to fall
Is that is would that be the act of falling in love is that what is about to happen here so um like that portrait of Adele block bow that we just looked at this is a painting that kind of bridg is this gap between realism in the faces um
Here and in some of this flesh and modernism in all of this flat abstraction here now uh a a sketch that he made sort of contemporaneous to this painting is uh over on the left and we can’t say for sure if it’s if it’s a sketch for this painting because he did
A lot of embracing couples at this point but because they are also standing on the edge of a cliff I I tend to think that it is like an early concept for the kiss and we can see it’s the couples they’re intimately intertwined here they’ve got their robes and their
Distinct patterns but there’s a choice here that gusta climp made and eventually abandon and I think it’s for the best because he was originally thinking that the woman’s bare rear end should be poking out of this Embrace and you know everybody would have said this is pornographic and got all upset with
Him So eventually he just decides to keep the the this couple fully clothed now there’s a lot of speculation in terms of who this couple is and I am sort of a fan of this theory that it could be a self-portrait of Gustav Clint with Emily flog because we know that at
One point he did have feelings for her but that that that probably cooled into a a platonic relationship and so here is somebody who is um who is showing us this sense of romantic love but perhaps it’s an unrequited love and I think um sometimes you can get into well I I
Think you can get into uh the gestures and the poses here and read them in in surprisingly different ways like what at first glance seems like um sort of a consensual Embrace here perhaps it’s something that she’s resisting I mean her head is sort of angled uh strangely
Here sort of resting on her shoulder in an unnatural position one of her hands is on on his hand as though maybe she’s trying to control it the other hand almost looks like she could be scratching at his neck um is is she trying to resist what um his his uh
Amorous advances here is that why they’ve backed up to the edge of this Cliff at this moment so um so there’s there’s all sorts of ways to read this and I think um I I think having that ambiguity makes this picture so exceptional it’s it’s part of the reason
That um we we kind of wonder about it forever now when this painting was first exhibited in 1908 it was universally celebrated as an Masterpiece and from what I understand it wasn’t even finished but it was immediately purchased by the king of Austria for a whopping sum um of 25,000 CRS which in
Today’s money would be like $250,000 so his days as a controversial figure were over maybe it’s because he didn’t have any pornographic backsides um but he had sacrificed his core beliefs in order to get here he’s still expressing these um the Deep enduring power of like human emotion and desire
Through his art and the fact that this painting still retains its immediacy and its emotional impact today is a testament to this artist’s extraordinary achievement so I’ve got one last gold painting to show you and then we’ll wrap up quickly this is a picture that was
Called the uh Vision um but then later kind of ret titled or is popularly known as hope to so it does sort of seem like the an updated version of of that image of hope that we saw before another pregnant woman in fact it is the same
Model we know um and in this case the skull has moved from something she’s ignoring to something she is acknowledging and of course that skull is right there at the swan uh belly but this is like climp Greatest Hits alog together it’s abstract patterning it’s the nude female body it’s the background
It’s all there together but still there’s like this wonderful ambiguity because it allows you to do a little bit of interpreting on your own notice how there are these three women down below and their heads are all bent and their their hands are raised and their fingers
Are extending upwards and this woman who is pregnant here at the top um also has her head bent and her hand raised but her fingers are kind of curled down and I think that’s why people started to call this hope again because even though there seems to be this certainty there’s
Something that she’s holding on to here and it’s such a it’s such a powerful image that way so it is once again Clint dealing with with life with death um and that’s going to be our segue to Clem’s uh death and Legacy now um he became a highly celebrated artist during his
Lifetime he had like honorary memberships and degrees and that sort of thing but I must admit that towards the end of his life he became became pretty eccentric he was very isolated and he basically just began to draw female nudes and nothing but female nudes and
It really sort of crossed the line into like erotic female nudes and those works are seldom exhibited and I wouldn’t show them to to you in in mixed company so here we are looking at um cl’s death mask he died in 198 at the young age of
55 um he died as a he was a uh uh he had the the he was part of uh one of the casualties of the flu pandemic of that year um and what always kind of breaks my heart is this man who lived this very independent life I mean he had his
Female companion but I mean he he really lived a life according to his own desires and principles uh apparently his his very last words were send for Emily so there’s that romantic ending to his life um Emily being such a large figure um through his entire career now he did
Not have students per se he didn’t have a workshop there were a young artists who were studying to be just like him but he did nurture the careers of a few artists most not most notably um igon and Sheila and these are two of his works this is Sheila’s uh portrait
Unfinished portrait of gusta climp wearing the cfan and this is actually a portrait that he made um of Gustav climp the day after his death so Sheila um also became a celebrated artist for his erotic imagery fig figurative imagery and um and just a few years after CL
Climp debuted the kiss Sheila did his own kind of interpretation of the the kiss kind of tongue and cheek it’s called the Cardinal and nun um Sheila actually also died in the flu pandemic of 1918 so we lost a lot of creative people that year um and since then
Especially I think since the fame around the case of um of the portrait of Adele BL hour there’s all of these um artists today who are really interested in kind of updating or reexamining climp work so this is a photographer reinterpreting um the frz of readler painting here is
Another photographer kind of staging the the scandalous mural of of medicine and um and then you can see little references to climp uh throughout modern society even with the um the still fairly new portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama by the artist Amy sherald you can see little elements of Adele
Block bar look at that bent wrist in the bent elbow and then just using all this geometric patterning to flatten out the image right so we end with Gustav clim and just a couple of Big Ideas here that idea of going from Rags to Riches of sort of weathering and maybe even
Inviting all of these scandals to then kind of emerge as this um truly creative person making these totally novel paintings that still connect with people over a century later um in so many ways he um he’s a truly astonishing artist so um so we we’ll end tonight uh with uh
Maybe a newfound love and respect for uh this this real individual um uh person who who really marched to his own D both uh personally and professionally so we’ll end there for now and I welcome any questions or comments that you have about Gustav climp I will start looking
At the Q&A here um Marsha asks who did the painting of Vienna at the beginning of the slides let’s see if I have that in my notes um good question I should have credited that I do not have that in my notes I’m sorry um but I’m sure if you
Were to Google like a painting of Vienna from 1890 that is really what would come up that’s that’s like the key image in Google um Alana said were they both considered weird great question Alana and I think yes they were definitely outside of the norm what is kind of
Interesting is that um well I actually I can show you a few of these images right at the end here I still have some of those Landscapes that I so wanted to include but look at this um they would he and Emily Flo would they’ vacation together and you know know sometimes
He’d be wearing a calfan and sometimes they just look like regular people so I think um I think they weren’t weird all the time maybe which is kind of fascinating Ellen said who else was a member of the secession to be honest Ellen um nobody there were there weren’t a lot of
Other uh very recognizable names um I I was like reviewing the list the other day and I was like I I’m not even going to mention these artists because their names weren’t from familiar to me um but you could find a good list of them just on like the Vienna secession uh
Wikipedia page so I’m sorry I don’t have their their names handy in my mind but they’re they’re kind of lesser known artists um somebody asked why did classical nude paintings have a lack of body hair this was just the academic tradition this is a really good question
And it kind of goes all the way back to like ancient Greece and ancient Rome if you think about it you think about like the sculptures that you would see in a museum I mean they’re just classicized everything’s idealized I there’s never body hair for women it’s just been the
Standard for so long um and it’s kind of funny to think that a little hair could um could cause so much controversy but that is the case Alana asks were the naked models considered prostitutes of sorts that’s a good question I didn’t come across anything about that in my
Research um I will say that he was oftentimes sort of suggesting in the titles of his works and sometimes in the intim of the figures that that some of these women were lesbians but and and I think that that was another kind of scandalous aspect to these works but
Prostitutes I hadn’t seen um although of course they were paid models so you could you could make the case um potentially uh Marsha asks wasn’t it odd that a Jewish matriarch like Adele blower would pose in states of undress for Clint yes Mar that’s a great
Question I find it odd too I mean I don’t know much about uh Adele blower I did watch that great movie woman in Gold um starring Helen Marin and um and in be Society it was essentially like a Catholic Society Clint himself was raised Catholic um but religion didn’t
Really seem to factor too much into his adult life but then there was like this upper echelon of of like vienes society that was Jewish and part of like establishing their their their place in the pecking order was like to commission art so um so yeah it it it seems like a
Particularly like free willing thing to do to do especially for like somebody who’s in this upper echelon of society I can’t quite account for why she why she did it but you bring up a very good question now now we all have to like Plum into or dive into um Adele blow’s
Life a little bit better now who who owns Adele to now I believe it was a Chinese businessman who bought it uh Nancy asks please tell me H have you have a lineup for 20 2024 all all of my programs for 2024 are on my website which is I am culturally
Curious.com and I just posted them the other day I think you’ll like the lineup although G uh Gustav CL 2 is not up there but maybe for 2025 uh meline says he seems very influenced by Japanese flat painting and pattern absolutely that’s a reference that I
Didn’t even get into but you can see like there’s all of this kind of cross-cultural stuff that’s happening between like Egyptian motifs and ancient Greek motifs it’s all in there and Japanese is definitely in there I’m sorry I didn’t um point that out but
You’re so good to do so so thank you for doing that um somebody else asks are there are any of Clem’s Works viewable in New England great question nothing comes to mind but if anybody uh knows better than me on that please feel free to jump in
Um Ron said joined a bit late um how was he viewed by the Impressionists of France and Netherlands did he have a relationship or contact with them paintings are very different fishey influence in a lot of The Works interesting and curious Ron what a great question as far as I know gustan climp
Was I well I get this sense that Piana was kind of insular so I’m not even sure how much exposure he had to Art outside of Vienna we know he liked the mosaics obviously but did he even know about Picasso in in like in the early years that he’s doing these gold
Paintings um I I I’m not even sure so I’m not sure if the Impressionists would would be aware of him he came a little bit later so how how aware was of of the impressionist was he it’s hard it’s hard for me to say he studied art in like the 1880s so
Um so impressionism by that time was fairly accepted um it was like the posst Impressionists that were kind of coming up at that point but I I I I don’t think that was the kind of training he was getting so a great question I’m sorry I don’t have a concrete answer for you
Mary said please explain further how the geometric pattern flattens out the picture I don’t understand what you mean thank you so much for asking then the geometric pattern here in any one of his pictures um there’s no aspect of it that is rendered in a way that it
Has Shadow or depth to it so it is a flat pattern it’s almost like taking like the pattern of a dress and hanging it on on a wall there’s no illusion of depth there I’m sorry let me have a quick here um that’s really what I mean by uh the
The the geometric pattern flattens out the picture it um where there where there could be an illusion of depth it like for example we see like one breast behind the other over here uh the flesh looks like it’s rendered with an illusion of depth here but the this
Drapery here flattens that out Mary I hope that explains that um in a in in a clear way I’m not sure if it did uh somebody asked if I’m teaching now and I am teaching right now to you I’m not teaching with the university right now I
Find this um a lot more fun and I don’t have to grade any papers which I really appreciate um so again thank you for being here um when did he do his Landscapes I got a beautiful book about um about the library showing them the Landscapes
They’re so wonderful um he did them all throughout so he basically he would go on vacation every summer with Emily Flo and her sisters and he was known as like this hobgoblin of the woods he would just like spend all this time outside painting and the Landscapes are just they’re gorgeous they’re absolutely
Gorgeous I I fell in love with those painting with with those landscape paintings before I even realized I was in love with them because like in my first home I purchased for like above the fireplace a Gustav climp landscape I just loved it and then as I’m doing all
This research I’m like oh he’s been in my heart for such a long time um let’s see here somebody else asked what happened to his estate upon his death great question with all these kids how did it all play out well half of his estate went to Emily Flo and the other
Half was divided up among the women who basically went to court and said my child is a descendant and there were only six six kids that were counted as descendants at that point so this idea of 14 kids could be a little apocryphal but generally speaking it’s acknowledged
He had 14 children we know at least one of them died um but there were really only um the mothers representing six children who petitioned for part of his estate um upon his death and then Alice asks did his parents live to see his success and his nudes oh great question
Um I’m not sure well obviously his father um died uh fairly young in the 1890s but his he lived with his mother his whole life so I believe she was actually still alive when he passed away so she would have seen his success I’m not sure if she saw the nudes um
Especially the erotic ones that he was doing at the end of his life that’s a great question um Melody you’re here tonight great to see your name she says um where this sists related to ones in England renie Macintosh great question I don’t believe they were related um they
Probably had similar belief structure like the things that they were advocating are fairly similar um but I think they were kind of happening independently I didn’t see um references to um to what was happening in England and then uh somebody else asked will will the recording be here yes uh
Chumford library is so great about recording the programs and sending it out to everyone even people who missed tonight’s program so um I think it’s Abby uh shared a very nice compliment and I very much appreciate it Marca said do you do other presentations we could
Attend yes Marca I’m off for about a month now happy holidays everybody but you can go to I am culturally curious and you can see my programs that are coming up um in mid January and there’s a whole mix of them and like I said I think a very exciting slate of
Programs for for um 2024 Mary asks in the last picture of palis Athena there was a gold face on her chest was that part of her armor Mary that’s how I interpreted that um we could fly back to palis Athena it’s making that kind of funny face and um
And sometimes you do see that in armor it’s almost like a way to um intimidate your your Rivals and uh distract and intimidate to have a face like that I think that’s part of the armor um okay and so I think we got through all the questions there’s like 60 things in the
Chat and wow everybody you’re so sweet I love these thank you so much for these kind words Um okay Samantha says I’ve been to Austria and visited and seen many of the things and places it’s truly magical thank you for sharing that Samantha it Austria is now on my bucket list and it seems like like every Museum um in Vienna kind of has
Like a little bit of of Gustav climp so it seems like there’s plenty to see and do there we all have to start planning this trip Alana says uh those two famous wealthy people wearing their shirts um was Emily a red head I you know I don’t know if I’ve seen any
Colorized photos of her Sarah that’s a really good question I want to say she was just to make it true that that’s her in the kiss painting but I I don’t have any def anything definitive to base that on there might be photos out there of her
That are in color but I can’t say for sure and thanks for joining us tonight she said some of these paintings remind me of collage absolutely it’s um it’s right in there with the Mosaic Motif too like this idea of like Little Bits kind of coming together especially with Adele
Block Bower that really sort of mismatch dense patterning all behind her head here it feels like collage that’s a that’s a great note um Lori says it looks like he modernized the patterns of Emily’s chice of clothing not quite sure what that means Lori but um I’m now I’m
Curious thanks for adding it in there um thanks for the compliments along the way did any of his children turn out to be artist Sharon asked Sharon I’m not entirely sure I my hunch is that that’s not the case because I feel like that would have been a pretty big story um
But I it that’s not definitive but I I believe they did not um Judy’s here tonight hi Judy thanks for being here and your question and your kind words I really appreciate that um all the kind words that are in here may I take a screenshot of the side by-side portraits
Of uh including Michelle Obama you absolutely although I was a little mortified because I don’t have the best um resolution on that Michelle Obama painting but if you can take a a screenshot you’re more than welcome to do so um you can also find a better resolution image online I I’ll have to
Update that um let’s see here did he have an addiction problem Diana I think you might have hit the tail on the head with that one it’s probably that’s probably the case between the cats the women it seems like that could be true Judy says what’s
A good book to look at um on his work uh Judy I usually try to put together a good bibliography uh at the end of my programs and I failed to do that this time around I apologize I don’t have one off the top of my head that I can share
With you um but GI might be able to help you out with that uh Gianna from the Chumps Public Library Diane thanks for your kind words Paulie says do you know if Michelle Obama’s dress was actually like that or if it was the artist that
Created it that I do not know um she had such or has such an incredible sense of style I I suspect that that dress probably exists but I don’t know um I’m gonna have to look into that Polly that’s a great question oh we have a request for Clint
Landscapes I think we’re gonna have to do it um there’s a oh God he did so many other things too all these allegories it’s really interesting stuff um um did he ever marry nope he would not settle down I think he was having too much
Fun um thank you so much all these kind words he may have painted her naked without her posing oh Melody’s comment and I think you’re probably talking about Adele block Bower there um that could have been the case maybe he had another model and he just liked her face
Um Abby thank you so much thank you everybody for coming tonight and you’re very very kind words it’s like you were just like ending my year on such a high note and it means so much to me thank you so much um has there been a movie
About his life if not who would who would you cast to play him oh that’s a great question Jeff I don’t know who I’d cast um for some reason Harrison Ford popped into my head but I don’t know why um a movie about his life of course in
Woman and gold they only touch on him like for a micr second I think there is another movie though that kind of focuses more on him I can’t say for certain maybe somebody else who’s here tonight has seen something um but that would be that would be a pretty uh
Smoken movie because his life was so crazy wasn’t it rumored that he had an affair with Adell blackbow and some of the other women he painted he definitely had um romantic uh or sexual relationships with many of his models but I can’t I don’t know for sure about Adele block Bower generally speaking
That is not acknowledged in most of um the re in any of the research that I I did rless um Stephen thank you so much for your kind words disarmingly Charming laugh I’m gonna be using that line in my program descriptions what happened to his estate
Oh I think we got to that um we’d love to see his Landscapes how do you spell Emily’s last name f l o g e l I might be pronouncing it WR I’m so happy everybody had a great time tonight oh yes and you can visit his home outside of Vienna be
Interesting to know if it smelled like cats uh did I purchase an original for my fireplace Jack I’m an amateur art historian no unfortunately not an original um but I did go through a website called 1,000 museums and the reproductions that you can buy through 1,000 museums uh portion
Of your purchase goes back to the museum itself that houses that particular work of art so you’re supporting you’re supporting the Arts and doing that that’s that’s a a good place to shop for reproductions um Athena’s armor often depicts Medusa in the Press pit thank you for sharing that that’s probably the
Case right um that’s Medusa on Athena goddess of Bal wisdom thank you everybody for filling in that cap there um Judith looks amazingly like Jan Crawford thanks for saying it uh thank you so much for these kind words let’s see I remember a store in Vienna that only sold replicas of
Gustavo items fascinating yeah I mean he was like he’s like the um literally The Golden Child of Vienna thank you everybody oh Frank’s here tonight Frank thanks for your kind words everybody wow thank you so much Jack says Johnny Depp as a potential actor I really like
That all right I think I got to everything I don’t know if I’ve missed any questions um I would guess Emily’s name is pronounced flog okay thank you Agnes okay I think we got I think I saw every body’s very kind words and I very very very much appreciate you being here
Tonight and um and for giving me such such a nice feedback I’m going to just ride this positive wave right into 2024 you’ve really made my night so thank you so much everybody yes thank you everyone for joining us tonight really great presentation very much looking forward
To 2024’s lineup so like Jane said please go to IM cultur culturally curious.com to check that out um I will let folks know that the next one in the lineup for January 2024 is on January 27th at 7 pm on Zoom Andy warhol’s 15 minutes of fame so everyone please join
Us for that one next month um yes we will be sure to send out um a recording of this presentation to yall tomorrow or early next week um if you have any questions about books or movies or anything like that I can see if I can get some down for um Jill our
Programming librarian tomorrow before she sends out the email if I can’t please feel free to always call the library we’re more than happy to take your questions on that and see what we can find for you so thank you folks for bringing that up as well um and Jane
Thank you so much again um looking forward to next month all right everybody we’ll have a great couple um holidays coming up and I hope everyone has a really nice new year take care Happ holidays