Gustav Klimt: Drawings & Watercolors
by Rainer Metzger
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Book Summary Information
Author: Rainer MetzgerEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-11
ISBN: 050023826X
Number of pages: 399
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Book Reviews of Gustav Klimt: Drawings & Watercolors
Book Review: Deep in the senses
Summary: 5 Stars
Wonderful. Quick, immediate, and from the heart - or some other organ of animal intensity. Despite the title, there aren't so many watercolors, nearly none. The drawings are superb, though.
Klimt was an intense sensualist. He was often photographed in a floor-length painter's smock, probably wearing nothing underneath. Also, he was commonly seen in his studio amid models not just nude but naked, in intimate and revealing poses, often in couples and more-somes. Add in the fact that Klimt acknowledged three children out of wedlock, and posthumously faced claims of fourteen more. He was clearly a man profoundly moved by female beauty. His life ouvre of painting shows that.
Thousands of his drawings are available to scholars, but the few hundred here show Klimt's passion even more clearly than his lush paintings ever did. Some are studies for his well-known paintings; he was known to do hundreds in preparation for major works. Other sketches can also be traced to known paintings, though with less certainty. Still others are too vividly sensual to have been shown in his own time.
The author includes helpful and revealing biographical notes, largely at the beginning and end of the thick book. I must caution readers with eyes aging like mine are - although the lines of type have wide, airy spacing and low x-height, the text itself looks like 8-point or smaller. Some readers will be so physically uncomfortable from eyestrain that they will lose all the value, or at least enjoyment in those written words. Dear author and publisher: check the book's layout with graying readers before committing it to type, I beg you.
Outside of that, the physical presentation is impeccable. The book is thick, as I said, but that is largely due to the heavy, bright, opaque stock on which the pages are printed - it's a 400 page book with 600 page bulk. I am not criticizing. That quality of paper takes the fine detail of the reproduced drawings beautifully, without glare, and without showing through from the back. It looks and feels luxurious. The book's rich physical sense perfectly complements its visual sensuality. I recommend this book very highly, whether your interest is in Klimt, in arts related to Nouveau, or in simply womanly beauty.
//wiredweird
Summary of Gustav Klimt: Drawings & Watercolors
The best of Klimt's drawings and watercolors, beautifully reproduced in full color.There is no doubt about Gustav Klimt's greatness as a draftsman. Remarkable above all is the intensely sensual mood that he establishes in his limpid, fluid drawings and watercolors: the pencil or crayon line with which his subjects are described explores and caresses as though the act of drawing was itself a seduction. Klimt's drawings are often highly erotic and explicit, many to such an extent that they have rarely been reproduced. This has made for an unbalanced representation of his work as a draftsman, and a comprehensive survey of his graphic output is long overdue.
Rainer Metzger, a noted art historian, has brought together hundreds of Klimt's drawings and watercolors in a way that enriches our knowledge of the artist and enhances the visual impact of his oeuvre. Klimt's drawings and studies, and his elegantly direct and dangerously intoxicating preparatory sketches, reveal the underlying impetus for and structure of his elaborate canvases. 307 color illustrations.
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