klimtemiingles
Sunday 5 September 1999
Klimt and the girl he loved in his fashion
By Catherine Milner
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He was a brilliant artist, notorious sexual predator and father of numerous illegitimate children. She was a talented dress designer and the inspiration for his work, and harboured a desire that they would one day marry.
 
Now letters and love tokens belonging to a woman who captured the heart of the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt have appeared after more than 50 years.
Emilie Flöge met Klimt when her brother married the artist's sister and although he was 20 years older than her, their relationship flourished. She was 22. From then until she died, Emilie hoped that Klimt would marry her but he never did. Although Klimt loved Emilie, he needed the freedom to sleep with other women at the same time.
By the time he died he had at least 15 illegitimate children, and although Emilie was his official widow and the only person he asked for on his deathbed, he never publicly acknowledged her as anything more than a girlfriend. Privately, however, he showered her with gifts and letters. In 1909 he sent her eight postcards in a single day updating her on changing events in his life.
 
 
"Klimt had a very complicated, Freudian and four-tier love life," said Dr Wolfgang Fischer, who is selling the collection and who has written a book about the artist's love affairs. "He had an Oedipus relationship with his mother and two sisters with whom he lived all his life. In the mornings he would go to his studio and have extensive, passionate sex with his models; in the afternoon he would have his more elaborate erotic private life with the upper-class ladies who posed for him; and then in the evening he would go to the opera with Emilie."
 
 
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Serena Lederer, 1899
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Emilie was Klimt's muse - performing an essential role in guiding his artistic style, and an intelligent sounding-board for his projects. In addition she was clearly one of the few people who could tolerate the artist's sometimes rather boring character.
In his postcards he gives detailed reports of the weather and, being something of a hypochondriac, writes frequently on the state of his health, hangovers, a boil, and pains in his neck. He also talks in detail about tarot games he has had with his mother, the problems of arranging exhibitions, and the frustration of not getting into the musical concerts he likes. From time to time he urges her to tell him more about her life. No postcards remain to tell whether she did.
 
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Allegory of 'Sculpture', 1889
Vienna, Österreichisches Museum für Angewandte Kunst
 
With her two sisters, who also remained unmarried, Emilie ran a fashion house in Geneva that supplied clothes to the Rothschilds and other smart Geneva families - and sold clothes of the sort that were a vital inspiration for Klimt's art.
Her memorabilia, which come up for sale at Sotheby's in London on October 6, include a range of photographs taken by Klimt of Emilie wearing some spangled and gold-embroidered "Reform" dresses she designed, identical to those dresses that appear in Klimt's paintings.
Also on sale are two necklaces, one of which features a heart given by Klimt to Emilie, and a painting Klimt did of the landscape surrounding the summer house in Attersee, one of the few places the couple stayed for extended periods under the same roof.
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This was also where Emilie helped paint one of Klimt's finest works - the frieze for the Palais Stoclet in Brussels, when the artist was feeling too hot and lazy to do it himself.
 
wpe15F.jpg (3003 bytes) Ir a Biografía de Klimt
 
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wpe16F.jpg (1438 bytes) Gustav Klimt y Emilie Flöge (Español)