“The House of Guardaboschi” by Gustav Klimt

“The House of Guardaboschi” by Gustav Klimt echos his early artistic career, as a successful painter of architectural decorations in a conventional manner. Beginning in the late 1890s, he took annual summer holidays on the shores of Attersee and painted many of his landscapes there. These landscapes constitute the only genre aside from figure painting that seriously interested Klimt. Formally, the landscapes are characterised by the same refinement of design and emphatic patterning as the figural pieces. Space in the Attersee works is flattened so efficiently to a single plane that it is believed that Klimt painted them by using a telescope.

Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) was a symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. Klimt’s primary subject was the female body, and eroticism marks his works. Klimt was influenced by Japanese art and its methods and achieved success with the paintings of his “golden phase”, many of which include gold leaf. “The Kiss” is Klimt’s most famous painting.

Klimt died in 1918, having suffered a stroke and pneumonia due to the worldwide influenza epidemic of that year. Numerous paintings by him were left unfinished.