SOLD OUT: Art Focus Lectures | Gustav Klimt & the Vienna Secession

To every age its art, to every art its freedom.

Formed in 1897, the Viennese Secession of 19 artists and designers who rejected the conservative attitude of the Art Academy in favor of a more modern experimental approach, saw themselves as a regenerative force at the dawn of a new century in Vienna’s Golden Age.

Gustav Klimt, influenced by avant-garde movements such as Symbolism and Art Nouveau, became the Secession’s first president.  The lecture considers the work of this complicated artist and his colleagues.  Klimt’s unique approach to nature in his paintings of elaborately composed sensual nudes, ethereal portraits influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, and society portraits made of brilliantly colored patterns floating in a gilded and jeweled atmosphere continue to fascinate us and haunt the modern imagination. Featured in the lecture is the history of Klimt’s famous “Adele Bloch-Bauer: The Woman in Gold.”       

Denise Erickson is a professor of art history at Cañada College and a celebrated local lecturer.