GUSTAV KLIMT'S JEWEL

GUSTAV KLIMT (Austrian, 1862-1918)

ADELE BLOCH-BAUER

Signed and dated lower right: GUSTAV KLIMT 1907

Oil, silver and gold on canvas

140 x 140 cm

Neue Galerie, New York

BE DAZZLED

Enter the shimmering aura of Adele Bloch-Bauer.

Would you like to be painted like a modern Byzantine icon, encrusted in gold? 

Would your face appear transparent, your hands delicate and your eyes made to look like two large almonds?

Can you name some of the precious stones and metals in the picture?

Even the green floor on the left seems to be made of pure emerald.

Is Adele sitting in a chair or standing?

Find the contours of the big wing chair.

Symbols and patterns make up the background, chair and dress.

Klimt admired Egyptian art where eyes are the symbol of protection from evil.

Can you count the eyes on her dress?

Behind her chair is another pair of eyes; whose eyes might they be?

On the flowing cape you will find her gold encrusted initials: A and B!

GLAMOUR

A hundred years ago Adele was one of the most glamorous women in cosmopolitan Vienna.  She persuaded her husband to hire Klimt to paint her portrait. It took Gustav Klimt three years to finish the picture.

Now Adele is the most glamorous woman in New York.  Like pure gold, her beauty never tarnished.

THE LONG ROAD TO NEW YORK

In 1938 the Nazis stole Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer’s house in Vienna, the art collection, his castle near Prague and his sugar factory.  They didn’t like the Klimts and sold them to an Austrian museum.   The portrait of Adele stayed there until recently.  The Austrian government believed the museum owned it.  This was not true.  It belonged to Adele’s niece and heir Maria Altmann, who had fled to Los Angeles, California.  68 years later with the help of an Austrian journalist and an American lawyer, 90-year old Maria won her case.  In 2006 her property was returned to her.

THE JEWEL OF NEW YORK

Maria Altmann decided to sell the picture.  Adele’s portrait is now the centerpiece of a precious jewel box of a museum, the Neue Galerie, New York.  You have to be 12 years old to visit Adele but in the meantime you can console yourself at the museum café with the best apple strudel and hot chocolate this side of the Atlantic. 

SILENCE IS GOLDEN

Klimt didn’t like to mince words.  He painted instead.  He portrayed many of the beautiful ladies in Vienna.

He made many pencil drawings to prepare for the painting.

The artist draws his design with adhesive on the canvas. He then gently brushes the gold and silver leaf on the adhesive.   The rest dusts off and the gold or silver design remains.

GOLD

Why has gold always been so important to humans?

It has to be mined.

It does not tarnish.

It is soft.  This means you can engrave it and mold it.

Gustav Klimt’s father was a gold engraver. 

How many expressions and fairy tales do you know that involve the word gold?

THE MOVIE
The story is now a movie: “Woman in Gold”.

WATTEAU'S SHOP SIGN

JEAN-ANTOINE WATTEAU (French, 1684-1721)

THE SHOP SIGN OF GERSAINT-1720

Oil on canvas

163 x 308 cm

Charlottenburg Castle, Berlin

Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin Brandenburg

THE SHOP

You are entering a shop in Paris.  The year is 1720. You can choose to be a shopper or a shop assistant.  If you are a rich man you need to wear a wig.  If you are an elegant woman you have to wear a fashionable silk dress and pin your hair up with a ribbon.

Take a step up from the cobblestone street into Monsieur Gersaint’s shop.  Don’t trip over the bundle of straw on your left.  It will be needed to pack up the pictures. 

Would you give a hand to the shop assistants who are putting King Louis XIV’s portrait into the wooden crate? (The king had died five years earlier.)  The woman wearing the pale pink silk dress is glancing at the portrait while a gallant man is helping her up the step.  Will she buy the portrait?  What is the color of her stocking?

Take a look at the pictures on the wall and see what you can identify: portraits, landscapes, nudes and stories from the Greek myths.

Where could the glass door lead to: a storage room or office? There seem to be windows on the left.

On the right a standing man is explaining the large oval picture to a couple.  Are they young or a bit older?  They are inspecting the picture with magnifying glasses.

Can you see what the woman is looking at and what fascinates the man?

The woman is taking a close look at the trees.  The man seems so fascinated by the nude’s knee, that he has to kneel on the floor!

On the far right another group of people is being shown a small picture or mirror by a young sales woman.  Do they appear riveted by what they see?  Would it not be funny if they were looking at themselves rather than a painting?

Are you tempted to pull on the woman’s shoe that is peeking out from under her striped silk dress?

What would you buy in the shop, a painting, a clock, a mirror or a box?  Or would you prefer to take home the nice sleeping dog on the right?

ART DETECTIVES

The shop seems crowded.  Do you think you fit inside? 

Is it a sunny day or is it overcast?

Where does the light come from?

The silk and white of the suits and dresses capture the light.  The rest of the picture is bathed in gentle browns and beiges.  Is there a lot of color in the picture?

FUN FACT

Gersaint was Watteau's dealer.  His shop was on a bridge.  See what it looked like in the 18^th century.  Today there are no longer any shops on the bridges in Paris.

Nicolas-Jean-Baptiste Raguenet

La Joute de mariniers entre le pont Notre-Dame et le Pont-au-Change, c. 1752

47 x 83.5 cm

Oil on canvas

Musée Carnavalet, Paris

WATTEAU

The painting is roughly the same length as the shop: about three meters.  

The picture was displayed as a shop sign for fifteen days.  

Originally the canvas was larger and had an arched top.  

Someone cut it in half.   A different painter made it into a rectangle.

The paintings seen on the wall of the shop were not the same as in the shop.  Watteau used his imagination to invent the dealer´s inventory.

The picture was more of an advertisement for Watteau than for Gersaint.

This picture is Watteau’s last masterpiece. 

Watteau took only eight days to paint the picture.

He always thought that his drawings were better than his paintings.

ALTDORFER'S MIDDLE EARTH

Albrecht Altdorfer (German, 1480-1538)

The Battle of Issus

Signed lower left with monogram: AA and signed lower edge: ALBRECHT ALTDORFER ZU REGENSPURG FECIT

Oil tempera on lime wood panel

158 x 120 cm

Painted in1529

Alte Pinakothek, Munich

FANTASY MOVIE 

or PAINTING?                              

Does this picture remind you of a fantasy movie?

It seems hard to believe that it was painted almost 500 years ago.

ART DETECTIVES

Find the Persian King Darius in his chariot of three white horses and Alexander the Great, in hot pursuit. 

THE BATTLE

The year is 333 BCE; the place is present day Turkey. 

Listen to the ear splitting noises of battle cries and thousands of horses charging.

Alexander’s cavalry and infantrymen are in full body armor and plumed helmets.

The Persian king Darius’ troops wear red uniforms and exotic turbans.  They don’t use saddles and are riding their horses bareback.

The weapons are bow and arrow, spears and lances.

There are women in this picture. They look like fancy German ladies going to a party wearing feathers on their hats.  They are riding their horses sidesaddle.  Can you find them?

Altdorfer invented this; there were no female soldiers at Issus.

Identify the different expressions on the faces of the knights!  Some seem terrified, anxious, confident or calm.

Whose armies are larger, Alexander or Darius?

Alexander’s troops are lined up in perfect formation.

Darius’ men are being pushed into darkness.   The sun is shining upon Alexander’s soldiers.

You will now be able to tell who won.

AFTER THE BATTLE
Ride up to the tents of the bivouac at the outskirts of the city! You may find refreshments there.

Then move up the ramparts, past the fortress and climb the tower of the castle.  From there you’ll get a good view of Alexander’s future empire:

The island of Cyprus lies in the center of the Mediterranean Sea.  Look beyond for Egypt’s River Nile pouring into the sea.   

Hint: The Delta of the Nile has seven arms.

The Sinai Peninsula connects Africa with Southwest Asia.

The Tower of Babel in the shadow on the left is looking rather small!

Altdorfer’s earth ends with the Red Sea.  At the horizon you will even see the curvature of the globe.

ALTDORFER’S WORLD

Does Altdorfer get the events and the geography right?

No, he takes many “artistic liberties”. 

Accuracy is not his point.  He wants to convey to us the magnitude of the event. 

With the victory at Issus Alexander’s empire became the largest of the ancient world. It encompassed Persia, Egypt, Greece and Babylon.

SYMBOLS
The sun symbolizes the West (Alexander) and the sickle moon stands for the Near East (Darius).

THE SKY

The dramatic sky takes up almost a third of the picture.

The clouds burst open to make space for a tablet that describes the scene:

Alexander the Great defeating the last Darius, after 100,000 infantry and more than 10,000 cavalrymen had been killed amongst the ranks of the Persians. Whilst King Darius was able to flee with no more than 1,000 horsemen, his mother, wife, and children were taken prisoner.

This tablet is so much prettier than your average museum label!  It looks as though you can move it around by pulling on the cord.

FUN FACTS

The battle took place 800 years before Altdorfer painted it.

Alexander was only 23 years old when he won at Issus. 

He always rode alongside his men in the front ranks.

He never lost a battle.

Napoleon I was a great admirer of Alexander the Great. 

Napoleon’s armies invaded Bavaria and they took the painting to the Louvre in Paris. After Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, he removed it from the museum and supposedly hung it in his bathroom.

The painting was then returned to Munich where you can see it today.

FOR FANS OF THE HOBBIT and 

THE LORD OF THE RINGS

Both Tolkien (the author) and Jackson (the movie director) MUST have seen this painting!

If you let your imagination wander, you will see areas in the painting that will remind you of:

Mirkwood

The Tower of Orthanc

The Eye of Sauron

Anduin Sea

The City of Dale with Laketown

The Lonely Mountain and Misty Mountain

Helm’s Deep Fortress

White City

Dol Guldur

ALTDORFER

He was a Northern Renaissance painter and one the founders of Western Landscape Art.

JAN VAN EYCK SKYSCRAPER

Jan van Eyck (Netherlandish, ca.1390-1441)

Saint Barbara

Signed and dated on the original marble frame:

IHOES DE EYCK ME FECIT, 1437

Oil on chalk ground on panel, 31 x 18 cm

Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp

Click on this link to see the signature and to zoom: 

http://vlaamseprimitieven.vlaamsekunstcollectie.be/en/collection/saint-barbara

BARBARA

In this tiny panel van Eyck tells us the story of Barbara.  She is reading her book and holding a palm leaf.   Does she look peaceful or anxious?   Why is her dress so long?  If she were to stand on top of the tower would the dress reach the ground?

The building site behind her is bustling.  Spot a shed with stonecutters.  Can you see three dark windows?  They symbolize the Trinity (in the Christian faith this means: one God in Three Persons).  There is a river behind the tower (perhaps the Rhine).

Barbara was born in present day Syria and she was very beautiful.   Her cruel father locked her up in a tower.  He did not want any man to lay eyes on her.

He thought he could completely control her, but couldn’t.  When he was away she became a Christian.  Her father was furious and tried to force her to give up her faith.  When she refused, he killed her.  At that moment lightning struck him.

MEDIEVAL SKYSCRAPERS

Do you sometimes wonder what it takes to build a high rise?  How many men are needed, how much time does it take and what kind of materials are involved? 

Rewind to the year 1437, the year Jan van Eyck painted Saint Barbara. You can see how many men are working on the building.  A man, perhaps the bishop, is showing three women around the construction site. 

The tower behind Barbara may be based on Cologne cathedral (a cathedral houses the bishop’s throne, the cathedra).  Cologne cathedral took 600 years to be completed (they halted the construction for 400 years).  It is still the tallest Roman Catholic cathedral in the world. 

Compare some of the tallest skyscrapers in the world:

Burj Khalifa, Dubai: 828 m

Freedom Tower, New York: 415 m

Empire State Building, New York: 381 m

Eiffel Tower, Paris: 301 m

Cologne Cathedral: 157 m

UNDERDRAWING OR FINISHED PAINTING

The picture is very small, about the size of the paper in a printer.

What seems unusual in the picture? 

Do you see much color?

Find the only area with color?

Some artists prepare their pictures by drawing the outlines of the design.  This is how the picture looks before they apply the layers of colored oil paint.

Jan van Eyck signed his name on the original marble frame.  He makes the signature look as though it was chiseled into the marble.

The big question that has troubled the experts:

Is this a study or the finished picture? 

ART DETECTIVES

Should he have worked more on it or does it look perfectly beautiful to you the way it is? 

Your opinion counts, please let me know on my website:

www.oldmastersrock.com