“The Three Ages of Woman” by Gustav Klimt

Welcome to my first blog and Thank You.  When I came up with the idea to create a blog about what I love talking about most, art, I became overwhelmed with excitement.  As I pondered on how things would work out and goals I would set for myself a good friend texted a picture of the painting The Three Ages of Woman by Gustav Klimt.  He asked me what I thought of it and if I understood it.  I decided to make this painting my first entry.

The Klimt painting is a 70 x 78 inch Oil on Canvas, painted in 1905. The current location is in the National Gallery of Modern Art (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna) in Rome, Italy. There is a detail of this painting that focuses on just the mother and child. 

Gustav Klimt was an Austrian, with an art nouveau style, who died at the age of 55 in 1918.  He worked with many medias beyond oil in a single painting.  Many of Klimt’s paintings focus on the female body. His artworks were portrayed as very scandal for his time because of the nudity, sexuality and eroticism he expressed using the artistic view of the human body.  But as Andy Warhol would say “Art is what you can get away with” and even with Klimt’s works being controversial his art was still highly admire.

In The Three Ages of Woman it is obvious that childhood, middle age, and the elderly stage is represented here.  But looking deeper into the painted I notice things like the blue ribbon wrapping around the middle aged woman and how the senior is drowning in a pool of browns and oranges. There is an apparent pattern of geometric shapes found mostly on the right.  To figure out what these would signify, I did some research on this painting.  I found that Klimt is known for using a lot of symbolism in his artwork and he uses mythological facts to explain his symbols.  In 1902 he was coping with the death of his baby son. Klimt released a series of paintings that focused on death and life after that. Knowing facts like these about an artist can greatly change the view of a painting.  We can now look at the browns and oranges around the older woman as a sign of death to come, for as earth is usually represented in greens or browns.  To me the blue ribbon looked as if it stood for youth and life as it wove itself around the middle aged woman and up to the child.  But looking at other Klimt paintings blue is a representative for death and it’s wrapping around her as a reminder that death is always near.  The painting presents the message Klimt would like to remind the world: “in life we are in death.”

UPDATE: September 22, 2010- The focus of the Mother and Child can be purchased at IKEA along with another painting by Klimt called Water Serpents II

Photo and Information was gathered from http://www.artinthepicture.com/paintings/Gustav_Klimt/The-Three-Ages-of-Woman/