The Modern Art Notes Podcast

This week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast spotlights the drawings of Gustav Klimt as presented in “The Magic of Line,” a survey exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum on view through September 23. Joining me to discuss Klimt’s works on paper is Albertina curator Marian Bisanz-Prakken, who organized the show.

While the development of modernism in Paris receives far more attention in America than the development of modernism in other parts of Europe, it wasn’t just Picasso and Matisse and their followers who changed art in the early twentieth century. In Vienna, Gustav Klimt transformed himself from a court painter into a symbolist influenced by the way Vienna’s intellectuals began to encourage us to look inward, to a space-flattening modernist who dared to cross the lines that separated Catholics from Jews in segregated Vienna and who made erotic paintings and drawings a central focus of his work.

Bisanz-Prakken oversees the Gustav Klimt drawings catalogue raisonne project. At the Albertina she is the curator of Dutch drawings (she has published numerous articles on Rembrandt’s drawings) as well as the curator for turn-of-the-century Austrian works on paper.

On the second segment, artist Roy Dowell tells us about works he’s showing in “Made in LA 2012,” which might be better known as the Hammer biennial. Among the works we discuss is the work that the Hammer and LAXART installed as a billboard on Culver City’s La Cienega Boulevard. 

Dowell is the chairman of the graduate fine arts department at the Otis College of Art and Design. His work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MOCA, the Hammer and the Berkeley Art Museum.

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Image: Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Sonia Knips, 1898. The drawing for this portrait is included in the Getty show — and is discussed on this week’s program.