Gustav Klimt, Death and Life, 1910, reworked 1915, oil on canvas, 178 x 198 cm (Leopold Museum, Vienna)
Smarthistory images for teaching and learning:
[flickr_tags user_id=”82032880@N00″ tags=”KlimtDeath,”]
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:04] We’re in the Leopold Museum in Vienna, and we’re looking at Gustav Klimt’s “Death and Life.”
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:11] Klimt is taking older, traditional scenes and reworking them and making them wildly contemporary, wildly modern.
Dr. Harris: [0:19] This is loosely based on the subject of the Dance of Death, which is a medieval subject showing death coming to people of all ranks, the idea that death comes to everyone, whether you’re a peasant, a priest, or a prince.
[0:33] Usually, Death holds an hourglass or a scythe. Here, and I think this is very unusual, Death holds a club and looks much more dangerous and menacing.
Dr. Zucker: [0:44] This skull is looking towards life eagerly. When I say life, I’m referring to this accumulation, this almost architecture of human bodies — old and young and newborn.
Dr. Harris: [0:55] There’s a sense of generations and generations of human beings who have been taken by Death.
Dr. Zucker: [1:01] If you look at the overlapping of those bodies, there really is a sense of succession, of movement forward in time, but not towards anything.
Dr. Harris: [1:10] They do seem swept along, as though in a dream.
Dr. Zucker: [1:14] That idea of their eyes closed, of the dream, I think is really important. This notion of the subconscious or of the dream state was something that was being developed by Freud in Vienna at this time. We should say that there are two exceptions to those eyes being closed.
[1:30] One is the infant, and there is a instinctual aspect there. This is not yet a learned consciousness. The other eyes that are open are those of the young woman on the extreme left. She seems almost crazed, almost delusional.
Dr. Harris: [1:44] To me, it reads like Death on one side and pleasure or sensuality on the other.
Dr. Zucker: [1:49] There is a real mirroring, and I think both figures are intensified because of the other. Their hands are even somewhat together.
Dr. Harris: [1:56] That’s right.
Dr. Zucker: [1:56] One holding the club, one clutching her breast.
Dr. Harris: [2:00] We see on both sides that characteristic decorative patterning that we associate with Gustav Klimt so much. On the side of Death, we see very dark colors and the shape of a cross, clearly an allusion to the church and maybe resurrection or afterlife. On the right, much brighter colors, shapes that suggest flowers, decorative patterns that suggest renewal.
Dr. Zucker: [2:25] That pattern, it really seems to flatten the entire image.
Dr. Harris: [2:28] In Europe at this time, we see an interest in the interior, in dream states, in a removal from the everyday world, a kind of reaction against the materialism and quick pace of modern industrial life. This interest in instinctive drives has particular significance in Vienna even more than the Symbolist movements in other countries at this time.
Dr. Zucker: [2:56] It does seem to me to be a really successful solution to a problem that artists had been grappling with for some time, which is, how do you rescue the profound qualities that art had been able to achieve in history, without resorting to history painting or the traditional modes that had been so worn out by the end of the 19th century? Was it possible to find a new arena to explore?
[3:21] They did, but that arena was an interior one.
[3:23] [music]
