
Photograph taken with Nikon camera and a 28mm PC lens by Michael Grove in 2001

Symbolism and Art Nouveau. The Austrians responded enthusiastically to the decorative artifice of Art Nouveau, and
Klimt is
almost artifice incarnate.
He painted large ornamental friezes of allegorical scenes, and produced
fashionable portraits, uniting the stylized shapes and unnatural colours of Symbolism with his own essentially harmonious concept of beauty.
The "
Secession building" in Vienna, built in 1897 by Joseph Maria Olbrich for exhibitions of the
Vienna Secession Group ...
which was founded on April 3, of the same year by artists Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, Josef Hoffmann, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Max Kurzweil, Otto Wagner, and others ...
IS famous for it's Beethoven frieze by Klimt -
which depicts man's search of happiness.
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First posted by Michael Grove @zaadz on 19th June 2007 at 8.00am
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Michael said
Although Richard Dorment has said of the Tate Liverpool's magnificent show of the fantastical paintings of Gustav Klimt … EAT YOUR HEART OUT FREUD … he has rightly concluded that for this event, a full-scale reconstruction of the Beethoven frieze is the only false note in an otherwise first-rate show and that IT ISN'T that the reconstruction is badly done, but that the space is so different from that in Vienna's Belvedere.
FROM personal experience I also believe that the exercise feels pointless.
Why do so many of the experts invariably overcook the egg ?