Lot 150 : GUSTAV KLIMT
Auction Location: United Kingdom - 2001
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Description:
GUSTAV KLIMT
1862-1918
liegender halbakt nach rechts
(reclining woman, partially dressed, turned to the right)
stamped with the Nachlass mark
red crayon on paper
37 by 56 cm., 14 1/2 by 22 in.
Executed in 1912-13.
Provenance
E. W. Kornfeld, Bern
Literature
Alice Strobl, Gustav Klimt, die Zeichnungen 1912-1918, Salzburg, 1984, vol. III, p. 53, no. 2303, illustrated
Drawings such as the present work portray Klimt's fascination with female sexuality, a subject that was still taboo in Viennese society at the turn of the century. 'It is not strange, in a neurotic, self-indulgent metropolis like Vienna - already titillated to the point of spontaneous combustion by the "erotic pollution" of Arthur Schnitzler's plays and Richard Strauss's operas - that both Klimt and Freud should have focused upon sex as the primary spectacle and motivating factor in life. What is surprising is that time and the sheer beauty of Klimt's sensuous facades have obscured the blunt urgency of that artist's close and unremitting fixation upon sexuality. History seems to have ascribed the full revelation as well as exploitation of sex in art to the Expressionist and Surrealist movements, interpreting the Jugendstil generation of Klimt and indeed the whole international art movement as merely erotic prelude. Nevertheless this prelude, orchestrated in a period of hypocritical Victorian repression, was of Wagnerian proportions - sensuous and insistent - a leitmotif that predicated what was to come' (A. Comini, Gustav Klimt, New York, 1975, p. 6).
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