Klimt Quotes

She closed Dan's door and walked down the hall to her room. He makes a good boyfriend, she repeated to herself. What the hell was that suppose to mean? She didn't just want a good boyfriend. She wanted that thing Gustav Klimt had captured so perfectly in The Kiss. That radiant, electric, hold-me-tight-so-I don't-fall-from-up-here-in-the-sky feeling of being in love. Well, don't we all, sweetie?

Truth is like fire; to tell the truth means to glow and burn.

All art is erotic.

Who did that Klimt sketch remind you of when you bought it?” “You.” The answer comes fast and honest. “I just didn’t know it yet.

I have the gift of neither the spoken nor the written word, especially if I have to say something about myself or my work. Whoever wants to know something about me -as an artist, the only notable thing- ought to look carefully at my pictures and try and see in them what I am and what I want to do.

She is the goddess in the Botticelli clam shell, her eyes are the waterlilies in Monet’s pond, she is the hand of God reaching down to mankind. Klimt’s kiss is a portrait of us and I’m gonna steal it. Take it, make it mine, make her mine too.

She glitters like she walked out of a Klimt painting

Whoever wants to know something about me, they should look attentively at my pictures and there seek to recognise what I am and what I want.

Happy he who forgets what cannot be changed.

Any nonsense can attain importance by virtue of being believed by millions of people,” Einstein

to every age its art; to art its freedom.

Vienna art institutions had turned out to be more corrupt than Klimt had ever imagined.

The lawyer was Randol Schoenberg, the grandson of a venerated Viennese composer who had fled the rise of Hitler. The return of this ominous heir was anything but welcome. The painting Schoenberg sought was a shimmering gold masterpiece, painted a century earlier, by the artistic heretic Gustav Klimt. It was a portrait of a Viennese society beauty, Adele Bloch-Bauer.

Well, good night," he said cheerfully. "Thanks for dinner." "Oh. Right." I took a half step back toward the house. "You're welcome." "Ella." "Yeah?" "You've gotta be kidding." PECo hadn't some yet, so it was pretty dark where we were standing. I don't know how his hand found mine so fast, but one second I was thinking about how much I didn't want to say good night, and the next I was up against his chest, standing on my toes with my feet between his. "Is this okay?" he asked, his breath chocolaty and warm against my forehead. "Yeah," I answered, my own breath coming in quick little jumps. "Yeah." "Good.I have something I have to tell you." I waited. "I hate that Klimt painting," he said. "I really hate it." Then he was folding me into his coat and his face was right above mine, and there was only one kiss that mattered.

Then a new generation emerged, of Austrians who did not drink from the communal well of self-pity, denial, and deceit.

At Harvard, you could tell if a girl would sleep with you by her poster. Modigliani--si. Klimt--no.

Even before the First World War there was a strain in European art and music – in Germany more than anywhere – that was turning from ripeness to over-ripeness and then into something else. The last strains of the Austro-German Romantic tradition – exemplified by Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Gustav Klimt – seemed almost to have destroyed itself by reaching a pitch of ripeness from which nothing could follow other than complete breakdown. It was not just that their subject matter was so death-obsessed, but that the tradition felt as though it could not be stretched any further or innovated any more without snapping. And so it snapped: in modernism and then post-modernism.

Alma also had a brief dalliance with Klimt. Actually, just name any famous man from the period, and you can assume that Alma Mahler had an affair with him. If there was a man in Vienna at the time with whom Alma did not canoodle, he was not worth knowing.

antithetical to the new Germanic cultural identity undermined

of dark passageways, their footsteps echoing. Schoenberg

where

Repentance was scarce. Austria was awash in self-pity.

In this bleak Vienna, there was almost no one left who had not betrayed the decency of Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt.

The racially loaded culture wars of turn-of-the-century Vienna were on. It was only a matter of time before “degenerate” would be aimed at Jews.

The grief is not over, it will never be over. It still trips me up in unexpected moments, stumbling me all over again. What does it: a reminisce with Paul, the sight of a mate laughing so easily with their mum, a Klimt painting we both loved. Simple things. Two steps forward, one step back, righting myself and then not. But the moving forward is stronger, swifter now; the seam of melancholy more hidden. Yes, climbing back into the world. Firm.

This intensely lyrical vision of the pregant woman in [i]Hope I[i] is set in an ambiguous context peopled with masks, death's heads and allegorical monsters such as Sin, Disease, Poverty and Death, all threatening the incipient life.

Klimt’s work is beautiful and painted with minute attention to detail; but looking at it, don’t you think there’s something kind of crazy about it, too? MURAKAMI: Yes, it’s certainly not what you’d call “normal.” OZAWA: There’s something about it, I don’t know, that tells you about the importance of madness, or that transcends things like morality. And in fact, at the time, morality really was breaking down, and there was a lot of sickness going around. MURAKAMI:

Austrians were allowed to paper over their pasts and portray themselves as unwilling participants. They felt sorry for themselves, and for the proud family names sullied with the taint of Nazi collaboration. The Cold War began in earnest, and the West was eager to hang on to Austria. A 1948 amnesty brought a premature end to Austrian de-Nazification. Austrians began to deny their jubilant welcome of Hitler and to claim that Austria had been “occupied” by Germany, like

Because the English do not consume significantly more alcohol than other European peoples, this booziness must be something to do with the way in which they drink. George Steiner once told me, ‘You’d never find Sartre in an English café for two reasons. A: No Sartre. B: No café.’ He is right. The collapse of British imperial power produced no explosion of creative thought to match that of Vienna in the dying days of the Habsburg Empire – Freud, Brahms, Mahler and Klimt and the rest – and one of the reasons may perhaps be to do with the lack of a café society. Marxism was a café phenomenon until it gained power.

Wow." That was one way of putting it. "My mother likes Klimt," I explained. She had this, The Kiss, on coasters, a tote bag, and a tea set she'd bought herself for her twentieth wedding anniversay. It wasn't Klimt the painter she liked, so much as the combination of lots and lots of metallic paint and a red-haired woman in the arms of a dark-haired man. "It's me and your dad," she used to say to our collective distress. Little kids don't want to see their parents canoodling. Older kids really don't want to see it. "Hey. You keep rolling your ryes, Sienna Donatella," she would snap, "and they're gonna stick like that. See then if you can find a guy to kiss you!

Then, improbably, a door opened. In 1948, the state of Israel was declared…Nelly loved her new home from the moment she saw the ancient stones of Jerusalem in the desert sun. She was not a Zionist, or a partisan. She was an orphan of a hostile world. Now she had a refuge. A place where people who had lived through hell were embracing life, joy, idealism, and love.

A palavra falada, tal como a palavra escrita não me saem facilmente e muito menos quando tenho de me expressar sobre mim mesmo ou sobre o meu trabalho. (...) Aquele que pretende saber algo sobre mim - na qualidade de artista porque apenas esta minha faceta é digna de interesse - deve olhar atentamente para os meus quadros e tentar depreender deles o que sou e o que pretendo.

This evening : Fischl and Mayreder debated on Secession, Fischl pro and Mayreder contra - primarily against Olbrich. It's all very well to dismiss him, to criticize - but just try doing better yourself dear Mayreder ! It was the fourth time that M. had called on us in the last few days, and we're heartily glad to be rid of him. Nobody misses him, myself least of all. - I wonder if he's still fond of me? He's very taken with the Secessionist painters, being particularly 'enamoured' - as he puts it - of Bacher, Engelhart and Klimt. Of the latter he says he can well understand young ladies falling for him "in a big way". Oh yes, that was fun : while Kuehl, Klimt, Mayreder, Jettel etc. were here, Klimt gave me the idea of shaping my bread into a heart. I did so, then he formed a toothpick into an arrow and plunged it into the heart. He took red wine and made it flow from the would. It looked really good. He gave it to Mayreder as 'my wounded heart'. On reflection, I can see that it was a very brutal joke and I regret it, for at the time Mayreder gave me a look that went straight through me. Incidentally, Klimt knows that M. is fond of me. He noticed - and said as much as well. I didn't deny it.

Research from Denis Dutton, Brian Boyd, V.S. Ramachandran, William Hirstein and E.O. Wilson, among many others, is clear on the subject: we are enticed by forms, shapes, rhythms and movements that are useful to our existence. We find Vermeer’s “The Girl with the Pearl Earring,” beautiful, for example, because her face is symmetrical, a clue to her strong immune system2. As the neuroscientist Eric Kandel suggests in The Age of Insight, we are fascinated by Gustav Klimt’s Judith because “at a base level, the aesthetics of the image’s luminous gold surface, the soft rendering of the body, and the overall harmonious combination of colors could activate the pleasure circuits, triggering the release of dopamine. If Judith’s smooth skin and exposed breast trigger the release of endorphins, oxytocin, and vasopressin, one might feel sexual excitement.

Sam was different. Sleek. Brooding and angular. An Egon Schiele portrait. Schiele if she remembered correctly had been a protégé of Gustav Klimt and had a propensity for drawing himself in the nude.

Ik hoor het ijs hier kraken.

Like a Klimt mermaid she seemed to him, all hair and foreboding.

Some elements appear in this picture which would be decisive in Klimt's subsequent work: for instance, the use of gold and the transformation of anatomy into ornamentation, of ornamentation into anatomy.

Eros and Thanatos were always the source of his inspiration, even though, from this time on, they usually appear in the guise of two simple and fundamental themes: flowers and women. These themes offered him the greatest opportunity to give a certain permanence to all that can be grasped in passing: an ephemeral sensual joy, the ecstasy of life.

I could still remember the sharp scent of varnish and turpentine in my nose, the careful, steady hands of the man bent over a Gustav Klimt painting. I’d watched raptly as the man carefully peeled back the layers of dirt and the patina of time from the old canvas. One side was dull and grey-brown, the other slowly coming to life in vivid color the way it had looked at its inception. It was magic. The purest form I’d ever seen. Something about it resonated with me then as it did now. The idea that with careful dedication, you could unearth your truest self even after years of brutal wear and tear. It gave me hope.

In het huis klimt de rat aan het raam en Licht op.

Achter het doek, schilderde de ezel, Gustav Klimt.

Impressionists, Cubists, and Surrealists who had stunned the world between 1870 and 1960 by entirely redefining art. VAN GOGH… SEURAT… PICASSO… MUNCH… MATISSE… MAGRITTE… KLIMT… KANDINSKY… JOHNS… HOCKNEY… GAUGUIN… DUCHAMP… DEGAS… CHAGALL… CÉZANNE… CASSATT… BRAQUE… ARP… ALBERS… This section terminated at one last architectural rib, and Langdon moved past it, finding himself in the final section of the library. The volumes here appeared to be dedicated to the group of artists that Edmond, in Langdon’s presence, liked to call “the school of boring dead white guys”—essentially, anything predating the modernist movement of the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike Edmond, it was here that Langdon felt most at home, surrounded by the Old Masters. VERMEER… VELÁZQUEZ… TITIAN… TINTORETTO… RUBENS… REMBRANDT… RAPHAEL… POUSSIN… MICHELANGELO… LIPPI… GOYA… GIOTTO… GHIRLANDAIO… EL GRECO… DÜRER… DA VINCI… COROT… CARAVAGGIO… BOTTICELLI… BOSCH… The last few feet of the final shelf were dominated by a large glass cabinet, sealed with a heavy lock. Langdon peered through the glass and saw an ancient-looking leather box inside—a protective casing for a massive antique book. The text on the outside of the box was barely legible, but Langdon could see enough to decrypt the title of the volume inside. My God, he thought, now realizing why this book had been locked away from the hands of visitors. It’s probably worth a fortune. Langdon knew there were precious few early editions of this legendary artist’s work in existence. I’m not surprised Edmond invested in this, he thought, recalling that Edmond had once referred to this British artist as “the only premodern with any imagination.” Langdon disagreed, but he could certainly understand Edmond’s special affection for this artist. They are both cut from the same cloth. Langdon crouched down and peered through the glass at the box’s gilded engraving: The Complete Works of William Blake. William Blake, Langdon mused. The Edmond Kirsch of the eighteen hundreds. Blake had been an idiosyncratic genius—a prolific luminary whose painting style was so progressive that some believed he had magically glimpsed the future in his dreams. His symbol-infused religious illustrations depicted angels, demons, Satan, God, mythical creatures, biblical themes, and a pantheon of deities from his own spiritual hallucinations

Impressionists, Cubists, and Surrealists who had stunned the world between 1870 and 1960 by entirely redefining art. VAN GOGH… SEURAT… PICASSO… MUNCH… MATISSE… MAGRITTE… KLIMT… KANDINSKY… JOHNS… HOCKNEY… GAUGUIN… DUCHAMP… DEGAS… CHAGALL… CÉZANNE… CASSATT… BRAQUE… ARP… ALBERS…

Freud’s theorizing, Schnitzler’s writings, and the paintings of Klimt, Schiele, and Kokoschka had a common insight into the nature of human instinctual life. During the period of 1890 to 1918, the insights of these five men into the irrationality of everyday life helped Vienna to become the center of modernist thought and culture. We still live in that culture today. Modernism began in the mid-nineteenth century as a response not only to the restrictions and hypocrisies of everyday life, but also as a reaction to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the rationality of human behavior. The Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, was characterized by the idea that all is well with the world because human action is governed by reason. It is through reason that we achieve enlightenment, because our mind can exert control over our emotions and feelings. The

The discovery of our mind’s largely irrational nature prompted what may be the most radical and influential of the three revolutions in human thought that, as Freud noted, determined how we view ourselves and our place in the universe. The first such revolution, the Copernican revolution of the sixteenth century, revealed that the earth is not the center of the universe, but rather a small satellite orbiting the sun. The second, the Darwinian revolution of the nineteenth century, revealed that we are not created divinely or uniquely but instead evolved from simpler animals by a process of natural selection. The third great revolution, the Freudian revolution of Vienna 1900, revealed that we do not consciously control our own actions but are instead driven by unconscious motives. This third revolution later led to the idea that human creativity—the creativity that led Copernicus and Darwin to their theories—stems from conscious access to underlying, unconscious forces. Unlike the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions, the realization that our mental functioning is largely irrational was arrived at by several thinkers at the same time, including Friedrich Nietzsche in the middle of the nineteenth century. Freud, who was much influenced by both Darwin and Nietzsche, is most frequently identified with the third revolution because he was its most profound and articulate exponent. It was, however, a discovery he did not make in isolation: his contemporaries Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele also discovered and explored new aspects of our unconscious mental life. They understood women better than Freud, particularly the nature of women’s sexuality and maternal instinct, and they saw more clearly than Freud the importance of an infant’s bonding to its mother. They even realized the significance of the aggressive instinct earlier than Freud did.

This is magnificent,” said Justine. “I’ve never seen anything like it. But I can’t make out the artist’s name?” “It’s by a friend of mine,” said Irene. “His name is not known outside of Vienna, but it will be—I think someday soon, all of Europe will be talking about Gustav Klimt. I was the model for this one. I don’t know if you can see the resemblance.

Ada perasaan yang kadang tak sanggup diungkapkan melebihi perasaan perasaanku. Apa yang bahkan tak mampu aku utarakan kepada seorang ibu. Bagaimana aku menyimpan semuanya sendiri, juga tentang mimpi mimpi yang tak pernah aku ceritakan kepada siapapun termasuk kepada ayahku. Demikian aku belajar untuk mengenali diriku sendiri. Ibuku memiliki sebuah taman kecil yang tersembunyi di samping rumah. Taman yang ia sebut sebagai sanctuary. Tempat di mana ia menanam segala macam perasaan yang ia sebut sebagai kebahagiaan. Kebahagiaan yang tumbuh dari hal hal fana yang tidak aku kenal dan mungkin juga tidak sepenuhnya aku mengerti. Seperti tangan yang mengusik lelap tidurku dan berusaha menciptakan sebuah karya seni yang indah. Ibu adalah sebuah lukisan yang  memenuhi seluruh pikiranku. Ia lebih menakjubkan dari lukisan lukisan karya Rembrandt, Gustav Klimt, Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir atau bahkan Van Gogh sekalipun. Jeli matanya adalah kegairahan musim semi yang menumbuhkan rupa rupa tanaman di dalam taman itu. Ulas senyumnya dan lembut bibirnya adalah kehangatan ciuman matahari yang membuat bunga bunga bermekaran. Dan sentuhan tangannya adalah sihir, belaian sejuk angin yang membuat setiap pohon berbuah. Dan setiap kali aku dapati ia menari. Ia menari dengan seluruh tawa riangnya. Sekujur tubuhnya menari bersama celoteh burung dan goyangan daun daun. Tangannya bergerak gemulai serupa awan berarak setiap kali ia menyebar benih, mencabut rumput, mematahkan ranting kering, atau memangkas daun daun yang menguning. Ada lompatan perasaan yang tak terlukiskan setiap kali ia melakukan hal itu, seperti seolah ia sedang jatuh cinta lagi. Bukan kepada ayahku melainkan kepada dirinya sendiri. Sebab, di dalam diri ayahku aku temukan bayang bayang lain yang seakan tak mau pergi. Bayang bayang yang tak mampu meninggalkan dirinya bahkan di tengah kegelapan malam. Ayah adalah sebuah patung kayu yang usang dan berdebu. Ia menyembunyikan segala sesuatu dan menjadikannya rahasia yang ia simpan sendiri. Seperti sebuah pintu yang terkunci dan anak kuncinya hilang entah kemana. Tapi ia tak pernah bertengkar dengan ibu. Mereka juga tak pernah beradu mulut atau menunjukkan amarah antara satu dengan yang lain. Sepanjang yang mampu aku ingat, mereka adalah pasangan yang harmonis. Walau tak pernah sungguh berdekatan dalam artian yang sebenarnya. Setelah bertahun tahun lamanya, mereka masing masing tenggelam dalam dunia yang mereka ciptakan sendiri. Sejak kanak kanak, aku tak berani masuk ke dalam sanctuary ibuku. Aku hanya berani mengintip dari balik keranjang cucian dan tumpukan pakaian yang hendak dijemur. Dari balik ranting dan juga rimbun dedaunan yang tumbuh di dalam pot pot besar berwarna hitam yang menyembunyikan tubuh telanjang ibuku yang berkilauan ditempa matahari. Pernah sebelumnya aku menangkap sebuah isyarat dari tarian hujan yang ia ciptakan, ketika merdu tawanya berderai di antara dengung suara pompa dan guyuran air yang turun tiba tiba dari langit. Suara hujan itu keras berdentang di atas genteng galvalum dan menimbulkan suara berisik. Dan raga  ibu yang berpendar kehijauan seolah terbang ke langit menyambut suara guntur dan halilintar. Kadang kadang aku menangkap bayangan tubuh ibuku berjalan hilir mudik di dalam sanctuary itu entah dengan siapa. Acap aku dengar ia tertawa tergelak gelak. Suaranya bergema seperti di dalam gua. Aku selalu mengira ia tak pernah sendirian, selalu ada orang orang yang datang menemaninya entah darimana. Sering kulihat ia menjelma menjadi burung dengan warna bulu yang memesona atau menjadi bidadari yang cantik dengan sepasang sayap berwarna jingga keemasan. Dan dari balik perdu yang merayap di dinding, aku dapat melihat senyumnya yang sangat menawan, seperti menyentil kesadaranku dan membuatku terbangun dari mimpi.

Klimt's unblinking honesty in the face of human suffering was a truth I understood - and as I stared into his swirling eternity I saw the certainty of my life rise up to the glass ceiling, hover for a moment, and vanish. I felt the circle of time open into a possibility I had never dreamt of. In that moment, I saw exactly what Klimt meant by truth in art.

Our next stop was Terceira’s surest shot for a tourist attraction: Algar do Carvão, probably the only known place in the world where you can walk inside the cone of a volcano. There was an initial explosion some three thousand two hundred years ago, and then two thousand years ago another eruption at the same site spewed molten lava inside the mountain. When the lava drained, it left chambers whose rock walls were as varied in colors of bronzes and golds as the cloak of the lover in the Gustav Klimt painting The Kiss.

Her, though! Once when I was in high school she caught me doing something or other, imitating my Spanish teacher, perhaps with a pair of tights on my head, and said, like someone at the end of her rope, “What are you, a queer?” I’d been called a sissy before, not by her but by plenty of other people. That was different, though, as the word was less potent, something used by children. When my mother called me a queer, my face turned scarlet and I exploded. “Me? What are you talking about? Why would you even say a thing like that?” Then I ran down to my room, which was spotless, everything just so, the Gustav Klimt posters on the walls, the cornflower-blue vase I’d bought with the money I earned babysitting. The veil had been lifted, and now I saw this for what it was: the lair of a blatant homosexual. That would have been as good a time as any to say, “Yes, you’re right. Get me some help!” But I was still hoping that it might be a phase, that I’d wake up the next day and be normal. In the best of times, it seemed like such a short leap. I did fantasize about having a girlfriend—never the sex part, but the rest of it I had down. I knew what she’d

The discovery of a golden scroll in a child’s grave near Vienna with a Jewish prayer—“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is Our God! The Lord is One!”—placed the Jewish presence at least as far back as the third century, suggesting Jews were co-founders of Roman Austria.

Like many things and many people in Austria, the bunker beneath the Belvedere possessed a mysterious pedigree.

In fact, Hitler was the beneficiary of kindness from Jewish Viennese…The Jewish owner of a frame and window store, Samuel Morgenstern, became the buyer of Hitler’s drawings and watercolors. Morgenstern, a kind, entirely self-made man, felt sorry for Hitler and managed to interest his customers in Hitler’s mediocre architectural scenes…

The Jew is not a burden upon the Charities of the State, nor of the city. When he is well enough to work, he works; when he is incapacitated his own people take care of him,” Twain wrote a friend in Vienna. “His race is entitled to be called the most benevolent of all the races of men.

To please many is immoral.

Adele’s life was a triumph of Jewish assimilation, but her portrait was a relic of assimilation’s tragic failure. Adele symbolized one of the most brilliant moments in time, but also one of the world’s greatest thefts: of all that was lost when one woman and an entire people were stripped of their identity, their dignity, and their lives.

Hitler was Austrian, though the world forgets this.

She is the goddess in the Botticelli clam shell, her eyes are the waterlilies in Monet’s pond, she is the hand of God reaching down to mankind. Klimt’s kiss is a portrait of us and I’m gonna steal it. Take it, make it mine, make her mine too. Maybe do that one first.