| The dissertation examines the landscape paintings of the Viennese artist Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). Although best known for his figurative work, Klimt turned to landscape at an advanced stage in his career. He embraced it emphatically, painting close to sixty landscapes from 1898 until his death, almost half of his total production during this time, the most important years of his artistic life. His turn to landscape is examined in the context of a crisis in meaning with his figurative art during the 1890s, and the founding of the Secession in 1897 to embrace international modernism. Themes of life, death, and rebirth are traced in allegories and portraits of the 1890s that suggest Klimt's adoption of a Nietzschean tragic vision, articulated in the philosopher's Birth of Tragedy (1872; rev. ed. 1886); Nietzsche's world view questioned the assumptions and "false optimism" of a rationalistic-scientific culture and celebrated nature and instinct as opposed to culture as a source of solace and creativity. Klimt's landscapes are shown to reflect this viewpoint in their presentation of nature as a "Sacred Spring"---a rejuvenating source of infinite replenishment---through the identification and analysis of formal factors that remain consistent---the square format, the exclusion of people, the suppression of cultural symbols, and the emphatic display of nature's sensuous fecundity in an iconicizing Stil of color and pattern. |
