Death and Life and Creativity.

Why everyone is a DJ now.

Gustav Klimt first began his work “Death and Life” in 1908.

It is, as the title suggests, about living and dying. It is very big and quite beautiful. There’s a scary Grim Reaper to the left of the frame (Death), presented in the typical manner (grinning skull, black cloak). It looks onto a twisting pool of bodies (Life), all having a really lovely time in a peaceful flowerbed, unaware that Death is slinking nearby in the shadows, waiting to claim them. I stood in front of it for a long time, marvelling at its colour, its form, the masterful way Klimt spun his figures together with paint. What a thing. There are many paintings he made that take my breath away, but this is surely my favourite.

I was thinking all this in The Leopold Museum during a visit to Vienna earlier this summer. There’s not just Klimt in there, it holds a whole host of incredible things. Furniture by Joseff Hoffman. Paintings by Egon Schiele. Some astonishing couture by Emilie Flöge, the designer behind the ‘reform’ dress which sought to free women’s bodies from the corset. She was also Klimt’s lover and lifelong muse.
They were all members of the so-called “Vienna Secession”, a group of avant-garde artists and friends who were challenging the artistic status quo and redefining popular modes of thinking. As I strolled around the gallery amidst their legacy, I felt a pang of jealousy: for their talent, for their bravery, for their having found one another to foster the work they left behind.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend a few weeks prior who expressed a fear that she was not as creative as her partner. I had to concede, after meeting him and his friends earlier in the year, that the man did seem to belong to some sort of modern-day Viennese Secession, where the mandatory profession was designer, photographer, or most elusive of all, “creative”. But when she said this to me, I had to stop myself from laughing – not because I don’t take her worries seriously, but because it seemed so incredulous.