Klimt, Death and Life

Art History

1848-1907 Industrial Revolution II

Symbolism & Art Nouveau

Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze
Gustav Klimt's The Kiss
Klimt, Death and Life
Böcklin, Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle
Khnopff, I Lock the Door Upon Myself, 1891
Khnopff, Jeanne Kéfer
Stuck, The Sin
Munch, The Storm
Rodin, The Gates of Hell
Gaudí, Sagrada Família

Klimt, Death and Life Gustav Klimt, Death and Life, 1910, reworked 1915, oil on canvas, 178 x 198 cm (Leopold Museum, Vienna)

Back

Klimt, Death and Life

⇐ Use this menu to view and help create subtitles for this video in many different languages. You'll probably want to hide YouTube's captions if using these subtitles.

[Intro Music]
We're in the Leopold museum in Vienna, and we're looking at Gustav Klimt's Death and Life.
And he's taking older traditional scenes and reworking them and making them wildly contemporary, wildly modern.
This is loosely based on the subject of 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 or priest or prince.
Usually Death holds an hourglass or a scythe.
But here, and I think this is very unusual, Death holds a club.
And looks much more dangerous and menacing.
This skull is looking towards life eagerly.
When I say life, I'm referring to this accumulation, almost architecture of human bodies, old and young and new born.
There is this sense of generations and generations of human beings who have been taken by Death.
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.
They do seem swept along as though in a dream.
That idea of their eyes closed of the dream, I think is really important.
This notion of subconscious or of the dream state, or 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.
One is the infant, and there is a kind of instinctual aspect there. This is not yet a learned consciousness.
And the other eyes that are opened are those of the young woman on the extreme left.
She seems almost crazed, almost delusional.
To me it reads like Death on one side and pleasure or sensuality on the other.
There is a real mirroring and I think the both figures are intensified because of the other.
Their hands are even somewhat together.
One holding the club, one clutching her breasts.
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 colours and the shape of cross, clearly allusion to the Church.
And maybe the resurrection or afterlife.
On the right much brighter colours, shapes suggests flowers decorative patterns that suggest renewal.
That pattern really tends to flatten the entire image.
In Europe at this time, we see an interest in the interior, in dream states, in removal from the everyday world.
A kind of reaction against the materialism and the quick pace of modern industrial life.
This interest in instinctive drives has particular significance in Vienna
even more than the symbolist movement in other countries at this time.
It does seem to me a really successful solution to the problem
that the artists have been grappling with for sometime.
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?
And they did, but that arena was an interior one.
[Outro Music]

Questions
Tips & Feedback

Be specific, and indicate a time in the video:

At 5:31, how is the moon large enough to block the sun? Isn't the sun way larger?

Have something that's not a question about this content?

Post a tip or feedback
General discussion about the site
Report a technical problem with the site
Request a video or feature

This discussion area is not meant for answering homework questions.

Formatting tips

Cancel or

( total)

Share a tip

When naming a variable, it is okay to use most letters, but some are reserved, like 'e', which represents the value 2.7831...

Suggest a fix

At 2:33, Sal says "double bonds" but should say "single bonds."

Have something that's not a tip or feedback about this content?

Ask a question
General discussion about the site
Report a technical problem with the site
Request a video or feature

This discussion area is not meant for answering homework questions.

Formatting tips

Cancel or

Discuss the site

For general discussions about Khan Academy, visit our Reddit discussion page.

Flag inappropriate posts

Here are posts to avoid making. If you do encounter them, flag them for attention from our Guardians.

abuse

disrespectful or offensive
an advertisement

not helpful

low quality
not about the video topic
soliciting votes or seeking badges
a homework question
a duplicate answer
repeatedly making the same post

wrong category

a tip or feedback in Questions
a question in Tips & Feedback
an answer that should be its own question

about the site

a question about Khan Academy
(Visit our FAQ)
a post about badges
a technical problem with the site
(Report a problem)
a request for videos or features