I've had this Klimt book for ages but never really bothered to read it, preferring to just leaf through and skip the text.

The other day while the girls paddled around the pool at the health club I took a few minutes and learned a few things about the progression of his work.

At left is Portrait of Fritza Riedler (1906). I don't know about you, but it always seems interesting to me to trace the trajectory of an artist's work.






Here is the Portrait of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstien.



This is thought to be a transitional work between the rather traditional kind of portrait he'd created with Portrait of Sonja Knips. As Maria Constantino points out in Klimt, at first glance the portraits don't bear much resemblance to each other, but each does have the same triangular composition as well as "a certain tension, expressed. . through the hands." I had not noticed those hands, but they are indeed clenched, not very Sargent-like, lacking those soft, loose brushstrokes.



One of the more interesting things Constantino points out is the halo/crown kind of decoration Klimt creates around Fritza Reidler's face. She suggests the idea for this came from Klimt's study of Velasquez (apparently on display in Vienna at the time). Remember that Lady Gaga hairdo on Maria Theresa of Spain (1652-3)? You'll have to scroll back up to see the decorative treatment Klimt creates around the figure's head in the first two portraits on this post. Just jumps out at you.


I worry so much about avoiding any kind of borrowing of other artists' ideas, but here's another instance of taking an idea, and carrying it in a new direction. Alfred E. Newman and I should relax.

Here's Velasquez' The Surrender at Breda (1634-5).

I remember seeing this at the Prado some years ago. Honestly, I think the only reason I stopped is that I lived near Breda (in Holland) as a child. To the contemporary eye it looks so conventional, with the Mona-Lisa-like plains in distance, all that attention paid to uniforms, the spears of the winning side thick and vertical, the ceremony of the vanquished handing over the keys to the city, etc. But the soldier on the left staring at the viewer strikes a more modern chord. Kind of arresting in his gaze. Almost steals the painting. There's another face looking out from the far right -- who is it? Some have suggested it's Velasquez himself.

I started writing this post last week, and lo and behold in today's NY Times there's a review of a show at the Metropolitan in NY about Velazquez and the controversy surrounding the painting, Portrait of a Man. The questions are two - who is it? and was it painted by Velasquez or his pupil, son-in-law Juan Bautista Martinez del Mazo? Although you practically need a magnifying glass to compare the figure on the far right of the Breda painting to the figure in Portrait of a Man, there definitely is a resemblance. A Facebook page for Velazquez would be really handy right now - or would he have been a MySpace guy?

Experts are leaning toward attributing the Portrait to Velazquez. By examining other paintings known to be created by his pupils, they point to those lesser paintings flaws: less confident brushwork, a less-taut shape of the collar, a muddiness around the jaw. To my untrained eye the Portrait certainly does seem to have been painted with an air of authority. Nothing equivocal about the choices made. What do you think?

(All the pictures on-line are muddy looking because the picture has just been restored; this one I took with my camera from the newspaper, so you can see the crease in the paper- sorry.)