Abstract:
Dance like an Egyptian:
how pharaonic moves tranformed Gustav Klimt’s art.
Liesbeth Grotenhuis
The Wiener Secession was such a succesfull group of artists, the Stoclet family from Brussels commissioned a mansion from the Viennese Workshop. Gustav Klimt’s contribution to this Gesamtkunstwerk was a frieze in the dining room.
One of the central figures is a dancer, executing a remarkable movement, that recalls pharaonic art. Yet it became ‘more Egyptian than original Egyptian art’. The impact of this specific source for the development of Klimt’s art shall be researched in this paper.
As a reaction to the academic norms of art (made for the sake of art), new pictorial solutions in other cultures were sought. Like the typical Nile Style. Klimt’s works illustrate different stages this adaptation underwent: the reconstruction of ancient Egyptian episodes based on original artefacts, followed by the integration of flattening effects into a new, personal style. Like the pose of the dancer in its contemporary translation.
I shall argue how in this period different disciplines influenced each other. Parallel to visual art, classical dance changed and used a pharaonic vocabulairy, among others. This specific translation caused the effect Klimt’s dancer shows. The moving flat hand in a horizontal direction now became canonical: from art deco adverts, the Bangles’ walk in the 1980’s and the now hot variation in popping: ‘tutting’.