acase@tulane.edu / Although a significant amount of scholarship has extensively explored Klimt’s depiction of women, little attention has been dedicated to his recurring interest in pregnancy. In light of its relative obscurity in Western art overall, the impetus and meaning behind the pregnant body’s repeated presence throughout Klimt’s oeuvre is worthy of further study.
My thesis examines how Gustav Klimt uses depictions of pregnancy as a vehicle to redefine the spiritual, scientific, and psychological divisions of society. In his disillusionment with the so-called progress of modernity under the aegis of masculine leadership, Klimt embraces the feared ‘feminization’ of fin-de-siècle society as a welcome reprieve from the failures of patriarchy. Despite his celebration of femininity, Klimt nonetheless relies heavily on traditional stereotypes of women. In the constantly evolving conversation between art and new paradigms of social order during the nineteenth century, Klimt proposes a feminine utopia wherein ‘Woman’ is the savior of a suffering humanity, with her womb serving as a site of redemption. By referencing divisive social issues, he encourages viewers to question their antiquated values. Klimt positions Woman not only as a spiritual savior and progenitor of the species, but also as a metaphorical site where self-definition and social harmony can be achieved.
In chapter one, I discuss Klimt’s conflation of sacred and profane, and spirit and flesh as captured in Hope I and Hope II. Envisioning himself as a spiritual leader, Klimt preaches art as a new religion more suitable for the modern age. In the next chapter, I explore Klimt’s incorporation of scientific theories and imagery as a critique of humankind’s self-appointed place at the top of the animal kingdom. With allusions to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and Ernst Haeckel’s Monism, Klimt locates the woman’s womb as the sole site where primordial unity can be achieved. In the third chapter, I investigate conceptions of individual and collective identity through the lens of nineteenth-century developments in psychology and sociology. Using the pregnant body as a metaphor of ruptured binaries - between self and other, male and female, interior and exterior, conscious and unconscious - Klimt reveals that the similarities humans share overshadow the arbitrary and superficial differences. Klimt turns to the influence of women as intuitors of the biological impulse, bearers of life, and agents of change in an ossified world.
Klimt’s utopianism is grounded in the female body as a source of radical change and social transformation. He posits Woman as the savior and source of a renewed hope that will birth a new evolved humanity more attuned to the tenets of femininity in its embrace of the irrational. By juxtaposing the promise of new life with the haunting figure of death, Klimt’s pregnancy paintings symbolize the death of the civilized body and the birth of a liberated self. Klimt positions women as the procreators of a new generation composed of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, or perhaps in Klimt’s universe, of Überfrau. / 1 / Nicole Lampl
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_79289 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Contributors | Lampl, Nicole (author), Foa, Michelle (Thesis advisor), School of Liberal Arts Art (Degree granting institution) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | electronic, 107 |
| Rights | No embargo, Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law. |
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