Their first commissions came in 1880: four allegories for the Palais Sturany in Vienna and the ceiling paintings in the Karlsbad spa. Klimt's style at that time borrowed heavily from the works of Viennese artist Hans Makrat, the master of Viennese historical painting. When Makrat died at the age of 44, Klimt and his brother were hired to complete his paintings of the stairways in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which were to represent the history of art from ancient Egypt to the Renaissance. It was at this time that Klimt developed his style of combining elements of classical art with symbolist ornamentation and more contemporary images of women.
It was not long after that Klimt began receiving commissions for portrait work . He worked from photographs, and his precise realism also became a trademark of his later works. But even in his early portraits, he began to incorporate his love of classical painting. This tended to outrage his well-to-do Viennese patrons, who were already outraged by his use of nudes in his allegorical paintings for the Kunsthistoriches Museum.
Klimt soon became the leader of a new group calling themselves the Secession, who announced their intention to fight against academic authority and the cultural isolation of Vienna. They fought for "the right to artistic creativity," offering Art Nouveau as a force against the Viennese bourgeois conservatism. The Secession began publishing its own journal called Ver Sacrum, to which Klimt contributed for two years. The first group exhibition was in March 1898; Klimt contributed his Theseus and the Minotaur.
But Klimt's bread and butter still came from the portraits he painted of wealthy Viennese patrons. For example, he painted the portrait of Sonja Knips, who was from a family associated with the metal industry. His non-portraits, however, were becoming more erotic. Pallas Athene (1889) showed many of the elements of his feminine ideal. His three paintings for the Great Hall of the University included allegories entitled Philosophy, Jurisprudence and Medicine, with the latter allegory featuring the image of the goddess Hygieia -- the goddess of health -- with her back turned on humanity. Klimt thought that medicine was powerless in the scheme of things, and his allegory was greeted with shock by the public. Klimt painted a response to the critics of his work with a work called Goldfish (its original title was To My Critics ), which had a laughing Naiad pointing her naked rear end to the viewer, in effect mooning his critics.
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