Vienna Art - Mother with two children (family)


    Today we went to the Belvedere Palace Museum! While we were there we were able to see many paintings by the great Gustav Klimt. This blog post is about his painting titled “Mother with two children (family)”. This painting really stuck out to me because I feel like you can see the exhaustion on the mothers face, it is kind of heartbreaking. The way Gustav painted everything in dark colors except for the peoples faces made your eye go directly to them. When you look up closely you can see the brush strokes Gustav made which to me made their clothes look rough which made them look poor. Also, when I looked up close I could see that all of them have rosy cheeks. This makes them look like they have been wind blown from being out on the streets all day and night. This painting really pulled on my heart strings and I hope that all the people who are living this in real life are doing okay and things will get better. 

    I think this painting is important culturally because it is done by the famous Austrian painter, Gustav Klimt. People love his work. His two most famous paintings are  “the kiss” and “golden girl”. People travel to the cities where these paintings are kept and they always have crowds surrounding them, much like the Mona Lisa. “The kiss” is currently located on the wall across from “Mother with two children”. When people travel to see the kiss, they have no choice but to look at this painting. Its proximity to a famous piece and being done by the same painter makes it culturally important. 

    I think this painting contributes to the cultural capital by showing art viewers a different class than a lot of the paintings that we go and see. Gustav Klimt's two very famous paintings are of people who appear to be very wealthy. This painting is a stark contrast to those two. It is dark and sad vs golden and bright. This is such a realistic painting and has such raw emotion. I think a city that showcases the bad along with the good is super important. It shows that the city is open to the conversation about things like poverty, homelessness, and social class differences. Cultural capitals are able to talk about the hard things and not cover them up.



Comments

  1. Meg KiehlJune 13, 2024 at 2:31 PM

    Molly, I really liked this post. The Belvedere Palace Museum was really amazing. I like how you talked about this painting and how it highlights more negative aspects of life and how a city like Vienna is a cultural capital because it doesn’t ignore things like homelessness, poverty and social class differences. That is so true! This painting definitely highlights some negative emotion with the colors and tone.

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