365 Days in the Garden

Gustav Klimt’s Spicy Artwork

X-rated paintings from the early 1900s

I recently went to a Klimt exhibit at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and walked away feeling like I had a new crush. I’ve written about his paintings of women and the countryside, but I have not yet written about the pictures labeled perverted or pornographic. I was struggling with understanding what was so shocking about his artwork.

The paintings I had seen at the Van Gogh exhibit were beautiful but, for the most part, not particularly shocking. The pieces created for the ceiling of The Great Hall of The University of Vienna had caused a call for the public prosecutor to decide whether his paintings were pornography. Replicas of these paintings were displayed by the Van Gogh on the ceiling and seemed mild to me.

It wasn’t until I returned for a second visit to the Fabrique des Lumieres exhibition called Gold in Motion (none of my links are affiliate links) that I began to understand the degree of raw sexuality in his work and why the turn of the (19th) century art world might be shocked by his paintings. At the Gold in Motion exhibition, the images were much more accessible. I found myself inspired and awed by the radical sensuality of Klimt’s work.

Klimt’s most famous painting, “The Kiss” (reproduced at the beginning of this article), came alive at the Lumieres exhibition. So did many other paintings he did during his famous Gold Period, including the one below. The gold in the paintings was real; somehow, the reproductions seemed to sparkle in the lights as the paintings danced across the walls and the exhibition hall floor. Although the exhibition has ended in the Netherlands, it is currently available in New York through March, and I highly recommend seeing it.

I learned a few more interesting tidbits as I read about Klimt and his love of women. Klimt was a leader of the Vienna Secession Movement, and his works often included images that were sexual. While those images were sometimes symbolic, they were often very vivid and shocking to the establishment of the times. See, for example, this article called, What You Need to Know about Gustav Klimt.

Furthermore, I was somewhat astonished to learn that Klimt often had two or three naked women in his studio while he painted — not necessarily as models, but for inspiration, as I learned from this article entitled “All Art is Erotic.”

It seems I am not the only one to become infatuated with Klimt. I learned from many articles, including the ones cited above, that Klimt never married, was rumored to have had numerous lovers, and fathered 14 children. I wrote about my attraction to his art in the piece below and have written several other pieces about the experience.

My trip to the Klimt exhibit was partially inspired by my commitment to writing daily this year. The experience opened my eyes to the joy I feel when I visit a museum or an exhibition. But, perhaps more important for me is the inspiration I am still finding, over a month later, by writing about Klimt and his art. Here is a link to the first piece I wrote about that experience.

I’m a retired community organizer and grandmother of two delightful children. I’ve been gardening organically for over 50 years, and I plan to write every day this year about things that are growth related. I hope you will join me in this new venture by subscribing to get emails whenever something I write gets published. You can do that here or at the bottom of this story. I also hope that if you’re new to Medium and decide to subscribe, you will consider using my subscription link here. If you do so, it will not cost you anything extra, but I will get a small amount every month.