「Look at the Picture and Talk about the Painting」Gustav Klimt Examines Love, Desire and Extinctionin Gold Leaf

Love and desire bring people closer, unite and create; death pulls people away, dissolves and leads to nothingness. The ultimate contradiction of eternal tugging and confrontation between love, desire and death in Freud’s works is transformed into a visual artistic expression in the works of Gustav Klimt, an Austrian Symbolist painter.

He takes gilding as the creative base, blending gold and silver foils with intricate decorative patterns, deliberately weakening the realistic structure of the figures, and purely interpreting the core of human nature with symbolic language. In the extremely luxurious “The Kiss”, the embracing lovers, wrapped layer upon layer in gold foil, are immersed in tender warmth, hinting at the sense of indulgence in the futility of life. The magnificent patterns conceal the fragility of the flesh, but can never hide the ultimate fate of life’s inevitable passage.

The composition of “Death and Life” creates a strong visual division. The embracing human figures and colors on the right symbolize the ceaseless reproduction and vitality; while on the left, the Death standing in a corner, is coldly on watch for the human world. The shadow of death sets off the heat of life. The sense of destiny of destruction, instead, gives rise to the urgency and preciousness of the embrace of love. The languid and dreamy female figures in his works, entwined among geometric and floral abstract patterns, carry a decadent and mysterious air, always lingering on the boundary between love and death.

Klimt, with a kind of decadent splendor, employed the visual metaphors of Symbolism to translate Freud’s abstract philosophy into visible images, allowing the abstruse mental speculation to be intuitively understood and deeply empathized with in the texture of the paintings.

The tea for today is all gone. Next time, I’ll brew a fresh pot and enjoy art with you again.