Ep 20. “ORDER vs CHAOS” The secrets hidden in Klimt’s compositions.

[00:00:00]When I was a young art student, I must admit I looked at Climp's work as most people look at Climpmp. Without deeper knowledge, it's easy to see just romance, beauty, gold leaf, and luxury all arranged in beautiful compositions combining hyper realism with ornamental abstract patterns with dashes of symbolism. And although hugely popular with the public, Climpmp is for the forementioned reasons often dismissed, at least by parts of the art establishment, as mostly decorative. But wait, let's look closer. Behind those shimmering surfaces, perhaps something stranger and much more interesting is happening. Is it cold geometry colliding with raw emotion? Perfect order wrestling against ecstatic chaos? And perhaps once we see that, we realize Clim's paintings aren't just decorative, but perhaps instead they're battlegrounds.

[00:00:56]Battlegrounds between two [music] ancient forces first described by the philosopher Niche in his 1872 [music] book, The Birth of Tragedy. The Appalonian versus the Dionian, order versus chaos, logic versus instinct, structure versus ecstasy. In this video, I want to decode the hidden philosophical war inside Clim's art and ultimately I want to uncover how Niche's ideas around the need for Greek tragedy to be reborn transformed modern art forever. Let's dive in.

[00:01:41]Hello and welcome to How to Create an icon and make a deeper creative dent.

[00:01:45]The show where we get inspired by artists, designers, and creative works that had deeper impact and become timeless visual icons. I'm Matt and I'll be your host. To understand this side of Climp, let's start by trying to understand Nietze. And no, not the older Niche that people believe was obsessed with the ideas of power, but instead the young Nietze who was in fact obsessed with human suffering. An idea had gotten from Shopenhau, who Nietze originally was a big fan of. And Shopenhau in turn studied Eastern religion and philosophies. For example, Buddhism and its concept of suffering and the four noble truths. And so nature being obsessed with the concept of suffering believed that modern civilization had become spiritually hollow. He thought he'd become too rational, too logical, too controlled and too detached from the chaos of being human. But he also believed that the salvation of that suffering laid in the arts and especially in something the ancient Greeks once understood, something we have forgotten, the secret of tragedy.

[00:02:54]In the birth of tragedy, his first book, Niete argued that Greek tragedy was built on the tension between two opposing forces, Apollo and Dionis.

[00:03:03]Apollo the sun god represented clarity, order, reason, mathematics, boundaries and a beautiful illusion of stability.

[00:03:12]While Dianisis represented the opposite, chaos, ecstasy, emotion, music, intoxication, and the loss of self. So nature believed that great art happens when these two forces collide. Not when one defeats the other, but rather when both exist simultaneously. Too much Apollo and the art becomes sterile and boring. Basically, this is what happens after Socrates put too much emphasis on reason according to Niche and as such ruined the balance of the original Greek tragedy.

[00:03:47]But too much Dionis and the art collapses into meaningless chaos.

[00:03:53]Masterpieces then emerge from the tension between these two forces when in perfect balance. And according to nature, art displaying this perfect balance is necessary to help the human race survive existence itself. Because as he said, the art of tragedy transform suffering into beauty.

[00:04:15]Now remember this idea because around the end of the 19th century, Vienna became somewhat obsessed with it. By the 1890s, Vienna was a city in psychological crisis. Science was rewriting reality. Freud, for example, was uncovering the unconscious mind.

[00:04:32]Industrialization was transforming society. And as we know, artists had begun rejecting traditional realism. This period became known as fandler culture or end of century if you prefer. And this period was uh defined by a mood of decadence sort of anxiety mixed with sensuality and existential exhaustion. And in Vienna right at the center of it stood Gustav Clint. Now Climpmp of course wasn't a philosopher certainly not in the academic sense. In fact some say he wasn't bookish at all and his art training wasn't from the traditional art academy but rather from arts and crafts.

[00:05:14]But niche's ideas had saturated the cultural atmosphere around him. The Vienna secession the art movement clim was part of was built on the rejection of rigid academic art and instead they favored the idea of gassum kunber which means total work of art. What this means is that the secessionist believed that painting, architecture, sculpture and the decorative arts, you know, furniture making, textiles, ceramics were all of equal value. And then the ultimate goal then was to see the seamless integration of art with everyday utility. Climp and his fellow secessionists such as Colan Moser, Joseph Hoffman, Max Kzv, and many more. all then approached their work much more as crafts as opposed to fine art and as such Climpmp had become a sought-after mural painter and this meant that he was familiar with and a great admirer of classical Greek art.

[00:06:19]But these radical artists of Vienna at this time also wanted symbolism in their art instead of just realism. Realism on its own was considered conservative and part of the Vienna academic tradition.

[00:06:33]blur. So these new artists then wanted emotion instead of imitation, inner truth, instead of surface appearances.

[00:06:43]And this is where Climpmped becomes interesting because instead of choosing between realism and abstraction, he fused them together. Hyperrealistic figures collide with flat symbolic patterns. And this wasn't random decoration because every shape meant something. If there's one place where nich's influence become undeniable, it's the Beethoven freeze by climp created in 1902 for the Vienna session exhibition.

[00:07:09]The work visualizes humanity's struggle against suffering. It's called the Beethoven freeze because it was inspired by his ninth symphony where the chorus finale was inspired by Schiller's poem Ode to Joy. And structurally, it functions almost exactly like nature's idea of Greek tragedy. Let's see how humanity represented by the figures on the left searches for an end to suffering. They do this by begging the heroic knight to slay the forces of evil. Basically, what causes human suffering like disease, death, desire, insanity. All of these things are represented by these figures. The next section of the freeze uh [music] features the so-called arts and the chorus of paradise. But if we read it as a Greek tragedy, isn't what we see actually the chorus typical of a Greek tragedy with the figures on the left representing human desire to reach for the ecstasy of the arts provided by the chorus. Remember this is a note to joy and as such representing the dionian [music] joy and loss of self. In fact, the pure nature of a chorus consisting of several people is in itself a Greek symbol of loss of self. Now, the end result is the embrace, which then is a symbol of the ultimate victory over suffering, if you will, because love and joy are the opposite of suffering. Basically, then the freeze expresses exactly what Ni says in the birth of tragedy. Humans can only reach redemption through art, love, and joy. So no, this certainly isn't just decoration. It's philosophy literally painted onto walls. And even more interestingly, beyond the story being depicted, the composition itself reflects Appalonian and Dionian conflict. See how certain sections are rigid and architectonic. Others dissolve into dreamlike erotic chaos. And of course, music itself is of central importance here too because remember for nature music was the highest Dian art form because it bypassed rational thought completely. But let's move on to some of Climp's work most people have more of a relationship with. Can we still find an appalonian and dionian conflict in something like the kiss?

[00:09:31]Yes, I know you've seen it before, but wait, let me show it to you in a way that you might not have seen it before.

[00:09:37]Have you ever noticed the contrast in the robes? The man's robe is covered in rectangles and hard geometric forms. The woman's robe is filled with circles, spirals, flowers, and soft organic shapes. Okay, you might have noticed this before, and you might even have spotted that this wasn't accidental. In symbolist and art navo language, hard angular shapes often represented masculinity, order, structure, rationality. soft curves represented femininity, emotion, fertility, sensuality, and nature. But have you thought how this symbolist language connects all the way back to Apollo versus Dionis?

[00:10:19]Because I think to Climp this visual language is more than just an expression of symbolism. Look at how the patterns appear ordered while the figures themselves are dissolving. the bodies to almost vanish into dynian abstraction.

[00:10:35]And now let's look at something I've only learned very recently because there's another layer here too. Around this time, microscopes and new scientific discoveries were revealing invisible biological worlds for the first time. Cells, bacteria, organic structures. And some art historians now believe that Clim's swirling motifs were possibly influenced by these discoveries. His patterns resemble living systems, life under a microscope growing and mutating, not static decoration, but instead living chaos disguised as design. And then of course there's the influence of Byzantine mosaics. Most people know that after visiting Ravena in 1903, Climp became obsessed really with gold surfaces, gold leaf flattened space, as indeed he was by the Japanese flatten aesthetic that highly influenced western art at this time. These flat, often golden forms removed figures then from ordinary reality, freezing them in eternal symbolic space. But what some people miss is that from a compositional perspective, this also helps underline the contrast between Apollo and Dionis, the reality with the abstract, the visible with the invisible. So everything might not be as it seems, but what might first appear as negative space is actually full of things going on. Which leads me to the strangest possibility of all. I mean this is only me speculating but what if we've been reading climp backwards the standard assumption is to assume that the figures equals human emotion i.e. Dionian and the patterns equals order with other words appalonian. But let's look again.

[00:12:27]Perhaps it's the realism of the figures that melt into ornamental abstraction.

[00:12:33]Look at how the patterns consume them.

[00:12:35]Viewed with a different set of eyes, suddenly the decorative background starts feeling less like structure and more like dynian chaos or to put it another way, ecstatic passion. If we stop looking at it at a as a literal story and start looking at it through an artist's eyes, maybe we see that it's the figures that are stable, recognizable, control, and the abstraction is where the reality sort of collapses. The patterns spread like hallucinations like dreams overtaking consciousness. So maybe then the figurative realism is actually the Apollonian representation.

[00:13:14]Perhaps as we saw in the Beethven freeze, the human default mode in itself is a state of suffering. And only through the arts of or love or joy can we dissolve and reach that loss of self that happens when two lovers kiss. And perhaps there's another clue here as well. The man is wearing a laurel wreath, a known symbol of Apollo, and the woman's feet are planted in the earth, another symbol of order and science. If we think about it that way, it seems clear that the realistic figures represent Apollonian order. And is it then the patterns that are Dionian forces erupting underneath, infinite, irrational, uncontrollable, just like passionate love? If this interpretation is correct, then this would explain why Clim's painting feels simultaneously beautiful and unsettling because the human figures appear to be drowning inside symbolic abstractions larger and freer than themselves. But ultimately perhaps it doesn't matter which is which. Apollonian realism meets Dionian abstraction or if you prefer Dionian emotion expressed through realism a framed by graphic appalonian structure. No, I don't think it matters which is which because there is one overarching thing that does matter. The thing that makes Climp's art so powerful and that's the tension between the Appalonian and Dionian. And Climpmp understands how to play between both.

[00:14:47]and he's handed down his knowledge to his prodigy Egon Sheile who as you can see further modernized the Appalonian and Dionian tension in his expressionistic art and even later in the art of surrealists like Darly [music] and in Dari's art we can see the tension expressed in a different way here is the technically brilliant hyperrealistic technique that represents Apollo and where the dreams and fantasies are given to us by Dian Isis and even later still with Mark Rothkco, who we know for a fact was very inspired by Nisha's birth of tragedy. And with Rothkco, he expresses this tension with big bold solid shapes representing Apollo and with the intense colors and the diffusion of the graduated edges representing the emotion of Dianisis.

[00:15:36]And the list goes on into modernity. But before them, Climp understood that unforgettable images emerge from tension, not from perfection or realism on its own, and not from chaos and abstraction on its own, but rather the collition and balance between them. So why are some of Clim's works so iconic?

[00:15:58]Maybe it's because every art museum shop in the world carries a range of kids memorabilia. But also maybe because his art often mirrors the structure of human existence itself. Is it our inbuilt human need to seek order? We cling to schedules and systems and identities logic. But underneath real life remains unstable, emotional, irrational, fragmented even. Climp didn't solve that contradiction, nor did Niche, but instead they transformed it into art.

[00:16:32]Perhaps that's the real meaning of the birth of tragedy. It's not escaping chaos, but instead learning how to shape it into something beautiful. So the next time you look at a climp painting, don't just look at the figures. Look at the war happening around them. Because hidden beneath the gold is the eternal battle between Apollo and Dionis. And maybe the greatest artists are the ones who never choose sides. So, how could your creative work benefit from finding a balance between Apollo and Dinosis?

[00:17:04]Could you experiment with compositions where areas of visual real estate is dedicated to achieving perfect balance between the two? Do you create tension in how you apply your paint or how you combine your visual building blocks? Is it in your choice of colors or is it in your visual storytelling? Either way, remember Nietze and Climpmp the next time you sit down in front of a blank canvas. See it as an opening act of a Greek tragedy. What does the tragic chorus bean and how does the hero respond? I hope you found this video inspiring. If you did, please share, like, and subscribe. If you do, I'll make more videos like this that hopefully help you become a more inspired artist. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you in the next one.