This is who I am, he appeared to be saying, take it or leave it. To please many is bad”, as close to the overt expression of a personal artistic manifesto as Klimt ever got. Subsequently, his 1899 Nuda Veritas also caused a stir with its full-frontal depiction of a nude woman with long red hair beneath a quote from Schiller that translates as, “If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please a few. Work went not to the university but to the State Gallery of Modern Art instead, before eventually being among a number of Klimt’s creations destroyed by the Nazis at the tail end of the Second World War. While the Department of Education didn’t cancel the commission, Klimt’s These were naked people depicted as, well, regular naked people. Not naked people perfectly rendered in the manner of Greek and Roman statuary, either. When they saw Klimt’s interpretation of Philosophy, the science faculty complained that instead of celebrating the debate and discussion of themes of great import, Klimt’s work was instead openly assaulting “the ideas of reality and facts” with naked people. Medicine, for example, featured a tower of writhing naked bodies from which a skeleton grinned in the centre, a work the university’s Catholic faction went as far as calling “pornographic”. They were, they weren’t afraid to admit, as baffled by what Klimt had produced as they were outraged by the graphic sexuality of the works. There were complaints from no fewer than 87 members of the university, who raised a petition calling for the Ministry of Education to cancel the commission. The paintings never graced the ceiling of the hall. Of allegory into a world of overt sexuality and thrumming eroticism. But Gustav Klimt managed it.Ĭommissioned in 1894 to produce three paintings on the themes of philosophy, medicine and jurisprudence to decorate the ceiling of the Great Hall at the University of Vienna, Klimt battered through the traditional realm It would take something pretty special to outrage Viennese morals in the
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