Maggie's Farm

She likes Schiele.

I like Schiele, too. Then too he tends to creep me out. Which is part of why I was intrigued when I first ran across him, that and the public display of youthful neuroses graphically illustrated.

He's a bit of a tragic "what if" artist - he had the intensity and was developing the artistic chops, but got cut short (flu, IIRC). So his body of work comes across as the conflicted juvenilia of a great artist who never got the chance to become one.

You mention reproductions; for me Klimt's one of those artists whose works have to be seen in person to fully appreciate.

I had always liked Klimt but never ranked him very highly or gave him much consideration because his work often impressed me as just ornament.

When I eventually saw more of his works up close I was surprised at how much more I liked them, and how much more there was to them, than reproductions had gotten across.

Heh!! Well I wasn't advocating you save up for the next auction that pops up. I wasn't saying that nobody can get the full Klimt Effect from a repro, just that I had not.

There are a bunch of artists in that category, for me, where I had seen reproductions & though "meh" but then seen the real thing and thought "wow!!".

Where it happens it's usually an artist for whom the tactile, textural nature of paint itself is part of the picture in some way; not just the pigment but the substance itself. That's often hard for a reproduction to convey.

That tactile, textural thing also happens to be something I'm attuned to, so if the repro doesn't get it over to me I guess I find that something's missing, and I don't know what until I see the artwork.