Artists

Paul Gauguin

1848 Eugene Henri Paul Gauguin is born on June 7 in Paris.

18903 Dies on May 8 in his hut in Atuona, Tahiti.

Gustav Klimt

1862 Gustav Klimt is born on July 14 in Baumgarten near Vienna.

1918 Dies on February 6 in Vienna.

Pablo Picasso

1881 Pablo Picasso is born on October 25 in Malaga, Spain.

1973 Dies on April in Mougins.

Salvador Dali

1904 Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dali y Domenech is born on May 11 in Figueras, Spain.

1989 Dies on January 23 in Figueras.

Andy Warhol

1928 Andy Warhol is born Andrew Warhola on August 6 in Pittsburgh, PA, to Czechoslovakian parents

1987 Dies on February 22 in New York.

Pierre Bonnard

1867 Pierre Bonnard is born on October 13 in Fontenay aux Roses, France.

1947 Dies on January 23 in Le Cannet.

Paul Gauguin

Where Do We Come From? Who Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897

In 1893, when Paul Gauguin returned to Paris from his first journey to Tahiti with more than 60 paintings in his luggage, he was certain that the exhibition of these works would prove a triumph for him. All the more bitter was his disappointment when critics and the public alike reacted to his art as they had always reacted: with misunderstanding and ridicule. His “brown Eva”  in the picture Beautiful Land was mocked as a “Female ape,” although with this work in particular Gauguin had achieved a successful fusion of Western iconography and his new, boldly colored, planar painting technique. Gauguin  went back to the South Seas and remained there, despite the adverse circumstance of his life, until he died. Towards the end of 1897, he began to paint a large picture almost thirteen feet wide directly on the canvas without any preliminary drawings: Where Do We Come From? Who Are We? Where Are We Going? “I have painted a philosophical work on this subject comparable to the Gospels. I believe it is successful,” he later wrote in a letter to Daniel de Monfreid, and he went on to report to his friend: “The two upper corners are chrome yellow, with an inscription on the left and my signature on the right, as if it were a fresco painted on gold ground that was damaged at the corners,”

The com-positional framework of the painting is formed by three groups of people. On the right, three women with a child represent birth and childhood. In the middle, a woman is plucking an apple. Here, Gauguin makes a reference to the biblical story of the Garden of Eden and the Fall. Eva takes the apple from the tree of knowledge. It reveals to her the nature of love, but at the same time plungers he into sin. On the extreme left of the picture squats an ancient woman, a symbol of death.

Gustav Klimt

Gustav  Klimt is probably the best-know representative of the Viennese Art Nouveau movement. He first gained a reputation as a decorator of the interiors of houses on Vienna’s Ringstrasse, together with his brother Ernst and Franz Matsch. They were also responsible for embellishing the staircase in the Museum of Art History in the style of Hans Makart. But in the 1890’s he gave up this promising career and, within ten years, had become one of the leading exponents of  Viennese “Jugendstil.”

His so-called “Golden Period” started in 1902 with the Beethoven Frieze and culminated in works such as the Stoclet Frieze of 1905-11 and the painting entitled The kiss, which is probably his most famous piece. Klimt  painted this work on 72 by 72 inch canvas in 1907-08.

With The Kiss, Klimt was returning to a motif that he had already portrayed in 1895 in his painting Love and subsequently, in a larger context, in his Beethoven Frieze. The latter was crated on the occasion of the unveiling of a statue of Beethoven by Max Klinger in Vienna. The Viennese Secession movement, begun in 1897, exhibited the statue together with works specially created for the occasion by its members. The  high point of the exhibition and an object of violent criticism was the  Beethoven Frieze, which covered three walls of the first room and translated into pictorial form  the composer’s ninth symphony as interpreted by Richard Wagner. The salvation of humanity by art reaches its climax in the final depiction, in which a naked couple embraces against the background of a golden paradise. Here, the man’s body almost completely blocks out of the woman, and their faces are covered. In the Stoclet Frieze, the sketches for which Klimt completed in 1910, the couple is dressed in a similar way to the couple in The Kiss, and the woman’s eyes are also closed. She is not being “kissed awake’ but rather remains in her allotted role as a passive object. Thus, The Kiss should not be read as portraying the sexual union of man and woman, but rather as a symbol of a paradisaical love in which ornamentation assumes the role of eroticism.