As the son of two artists, both of whom never liked gold, Klimt is a strange breed: My parents have made a ton of murals, jam-packed with gold. Not because they wanted but because rich people(the type of people who want murals in their homes and can afford it) love it as an expression of their financial status. Both of them hated much of those murals and I can only name a handful of works they truly liked, at the end of the day, the customer is always right. And having seen much of their work(and taking some part on a few occasions circumstantially since I can't draw a single line to save my life), I completely agree with them. We have a word which roughly translates to mobbaroque in English. In almost all cases, this is exactly what it is.
Having said that, my mom specifically has a few favorite artists, Klimt being one of them. Over the years she's been asked to make dozens of Klimt replicas(The Kiss probably accounting for 80% of them) and she's loved doing all of them. I think Klimt is the only artist to successfully incorporate gold into his paintings without making them look obnoxious or ostentatious. Not only that but made them look incredible. Admittedly I never looked all that deep as to why he was "obsessed" with it.
Mobbaroque -> Mob Baroque.
To me that's New York Italian, with lots of marble, gold, and extreme decor. It's a big marble tub with gold fixtures and maybe a couple of statues hanging around for good measure...in a marble/gold/mirrors bath.
Porcelain fountains!
Or the bathroom at Mar-a-Lago ?
Aside from Klimt it could be argued that Maurizio Cattelan has successfully incorporated gold into his work - although in the form of sculpture. His work "America", a solid gold functioning toilet, attracted quite a few crowds (apparently over 100K people "used" it), one notable theft, and certainly made a statement. [0]
You may appreciate the following anecdote about Picasso. He was offered a lot of money to make a sculpture entirely in hold. His response was ‘Great! I will paint it black!’.
I use it a lot but then again I lived a rock throw away from his house for a long period of my life but since The Rolling Stones are a bit closer to my heart, I usually resort to one of their famous songs.
I never particularly cared much for Klimt and usually despise gold. But then I visited a museum in Vienna.
My wife prepared the whole trip and I was mostly going with the flow. Unbeknownst to me, we would see The Kiss that day. It was striking. I mean, the lighting was obviously perfect and the surprise must have helped. But the colors, texture and shapes are just remarkable. I'll never forget making a corner turn and being completely mesmerized.
One of those moments that makes you realize the value of the original, the whole Walter Benjamin aura thing.
Klimt does use gold very well. But I am surprised by your claim...
> I think Klimt is the only artist to successfully incorporate gold into his paintings without making them look obnoxious or ostentatious.
Byzantine iconography comes off as neither obnoxious nor ostentatious. The use of gold in Botticelli's works wonderfully. And so on. What exactly is an example of "obnoxious or ostentatious" use of gold in art? I can only think of ridiculous things like gold-plated toilets. Perhaps you were exposed to especially egregious works that are not familiar to the general public?
I think both Byzantine iconography and Botticelli’s works were invented to be ostentatious. Gold toilets/plates/etc come off as obnoxious because the use of gold is actively detrimental rather than simply eye catching.
It wasn't until later in the Byzantine period that gold was used excessively in art. In the early period when it was largely confined to halos, as a contrasting accent around painted halos, or to convey specific religious symbolism, it was hardly ostentatious.
> largely confined to halos
I’d say that’s close to the definition of ostentatious. So we may simply disagree with what the word means.
I don't see how. I do not find the works in question ostentatious in the least. They deploy gold tastefully and appropriately in relation to the subject matter. Purpose and the role something plays in a composition determines appropriateness. So, for example, while gold leaf on a church ceiling can be beautiful when it plays a sensible role in the composition, putting it slapdash on your drywall McMansion ceiling because #GoldIsRich is incredibly tacky.
I suspect you are judging gold not from reasoned taste, but some kind of prejudice.
I am referring to the intent here. Gold in religious art is ment to signify importance just as the tacky rich guy’s gold is.
Use of gold on a kings actual throne may seem more appropriate than a CEO’s chair but that’s a judgement about what should be venerated not the intent behind the use of gold.
The thing most people find ostentatious about the "mobbaroque" examples is that gold is used to add gold to the work. As a physical demonstration of wealth, i.e. "I can afford so much gold it's all over my artwork". The reason people find the Byzantine halos less ostentatious is that gold is used symbolically in lesser quantities to represent something else which is perceived as valuable.
What would be the original "mobbaroque" word your parents use?
They don't use it exclusively(they didn't come up with it), it's a pretty common word across the country. So much so, that even google has picked up on it a lil bit: https://www.google.com/search?q=%D0%BC%D1%83%D1%82%D1%80%D0%...
> Mobbaroque
Oh, I didn't know the word, but I know what it means! Haha! Back in the days I worked in a printing house, one of the most common orders were business cards. Unimaginably large proportion of those were to be screen-printed with gold paint that increased in volume when heated on a paper that looked like marble. These orders usually came from people who had... well... no business to appear to be rich. Like, a local police department chief or an owner of a small refrigerated delivery service (that one was both morbid and bizarre as he wanted raw meat texture for the business card).
Being an art college grad, I tend to think that a lot of Klimt's portraits weren't particularly indicative of what he wanted to paint. It was what put food on the table, what customers paid him for. He found a way to please the customers that worked. How much did he enjoy it?--Hard to tell. From my student years, when I had to make a living from art, which was admittedly not so easy or successful, I'd guess that in his heart of hearts he probably at the minimum laughed at it.
I teach digital painting. You would be surprised how many students ask how to achieve ‘the color gold’. One of the qualifiers of physical paint (as opposed to digital paint) is, not surprisingly, its materiality. Explaining to young people what materiality is can be a tough ride. I have to remind myself that for some of them the very first experience of painting was on an iPad.
Of TFA, it is no surprise that he was greatly influenced by Byzantine mosaics. Both are supremely decorative, flat and strongly symmetrical.
Well, hold on. Gold is a specific color, specularity and emissiveness. I wouldn’t expect to achieve it in a 2D drawing program, and I’m not sure what fraction of monitors can achieve it at all, but it’s simple enough in Unreal Engine.
> it’s simple enough in Unreal Engine
The color of physical metallic gold is outside of sRGB color space. Maybe you could get close enough to fool people with some of the best modern HDR's (I don't know), but for most of the history of modern computing it didn't matter how good you were at digital animation -- no display could display the color "gold" even if you could mathematically compute the right color.
It's just orange, reflective orange. The italics part is the rest of the owl.
In addition to teaching digital painting I also teach 3d. What you describe is completely correct and something I would emulate using Blenders BSDF shader. This would emulate real world materiality, but my point is that color is the lest of the key properties of a metal. For the most part, the Colour would derive from environment reflections, which would all be tinted with ‘gold color’.
> Explaining to young people what materiality is can be a tough ride.
Sounds like an excellent opportunity to introduce them to drawing from observation? They don't have to understand what "materiality" is, just see that the object appears different depending on how they hold it, where the lights are and what else is around it. (Assuming that you don't have a bar of gold hanging out in your class you could grab some toy gold coins.)
Skill issue, Warhammer painters are all over it:
http://razzaminipainting.blogspot.com/2016/07/non-metallic-m...
What the fuck are you doing with that link?
Here’s the link without the bullshit: http://razzaminipainting.blogspot.com/2016/07/non-metallic-m...
Oh, sorry. I'm at work, and my company uses some dogshit safe browsing wrapper service. Sometimes i forget to trim the prefix off before posting a link. Fixed now, thanks for pointing it out.
I've been learning digital painting. Getting realistic materials is tricky indeed! So far, I've struggled with liquids, metals, glass, and the hardest of all: rocks. It's really hard to get the texture and shadow to feel natural! I'd be thrilled to get a few tips here...
Top tips….
Using a digital brush on its own can be extremely limiting. Digital paint is inherently flat and lifeless. Textured brushes can help, but not much. I would recommend employing natural textures via blend modes. The best blend mode for passing textures from one image to another is overlay. In this way the texture of a photo of a rusty surface may be passed onto a painting of a rock. Essentially painting with textures... or photo-bashing.
Here is a walk through I did for my students…
https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/pages/photoshop-p...
Happy to answer any questions.
Klimt is one of those artists that I feel primed to dislike, because it's so reproduced that's it's turned cheesy. I've probably seen more Kiss posters and fridge magnets and whatevers than any other painting in the world.
But good god are they beautiful. They just make me so happy to see them. Or sad.
My favorites are probably the birch forests, though, perhaps Birch Forest (1903) [1]
1. https://www.wikiart.org/en/gustav-klimt/farmhouse-with-birch...
Ironically enough, when I visited the neue galerie in New York (which hosts a small selection of klimt's paintings, including the expensive Adele bloch Bauer), the painting that impressed me the most was the most white and plain. The portrait of Gertrude Loew really shook me. Photos don't do it justice. I was hypnotized, it was such a strange feeling
It adds something sparkly reminiscent of life giving sun. Just some moderation like jewelry.. too much and it's monkey puke
Let me save you a click: Goldsmithing Was the Klimt Family Business
This is TMZ-level art journalism.