Reinventing Athena:Gustav Klimt’s Predilection For Ancient Greek Imagery

This article takes Gustav Klimt as an example to discuss the changes and remodeling of Athena’s image,as well as the attention and re-creation of past art by Western modern artists in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries.The article is divided into three parts: the first part firstly reviews the image of Athena in different periods according to the time clues,starting from the Parthenon,traces the expression of the image of Athena in the ancient classical period,taking this as the original text,explore the changes of Athena’s image,and examine the influence of the taste of the times on the expression and interpretation of Athena’s image.The second part attempts to explore Gustav Klimt’s subversive creation of the image of Athena,and to explain his understanding and re-creation of ancient Greek art: such as the direct expression of ancient Greek statues in "Allegory of Sculpture" appropriation and challenges to the cognition of ancient paradigms,the direct appropriation of the image of ancient Greek vase painting in "Tagra Girls",So that it can directly reflect "Greek art",and then transform it into a classic image in "Pallas Athena" that only uses parts or details to describe the classic image,and at the same time adds modern thinking to guide the viewer to generate other associations,"Book plate for the Vienna Secession",he treats the figurative images into symbolic images,and uses only color blocks and lines to complete the expression of the classical images,which also represents his ancient paradigmatic self-chemically processed fully formed.Klimt is not an example of injecting new life into the art of the past.In the Art Nouveau movement,modern artists combined traditional art models with their own works.The third part mainly discusses the remnants of Athens in Vienna in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries.The "divine nature" and the strong historical consciousness of modern artists with advanced consciousness of the times,while truly re-engraving the fragments of the past art,endow it with a new epochal character,thus continuing the vitality of the past art.