Schleifer

Born in 1900, at the dawn of the twentieth century, Erika Giovanna Klien was one of the leading figures of Viennese Kineticism, an important avant-garde movement that flourished in Vienna during the 1920s. Klien painted from a young age, but the decisive moment in her life came when she enrolled in Franz Cizek’s Ornamental Art class at the Vienna School of Applied Art in 1919. A pioneer in the field of art education, Cizek developed a concept of artistic expression that, as Marietta Mautner-Markhof wrote: ‘envisaged a combination of the three foundations of modern art – expressionism, cubism and futurism – to make “kinetism”’ (M. Mautner-Markhof, Erika Giovanna Klien, exh. cat., Vienna, 2001, p. 9). His classes followed a tripartite pattern, developing the observation of emotions (expressionism), the study of spatial relativity (cubism) and the representation of movement (futurism).
This radical perspective, combined with Cizek’s experimental methods of teaching, had a remarkable influence on Klien. She embraced his synthesis of styles, developing her own distinctive aesthetic and becoming a key figure in the Viennese avant-garde. As though to illustrate the significance of her contribution to the movement, she was chosen by Cizek to represent Austrian Modernism at the seminal International Exhibition of Modern Art put together by Katherine Dreier for the Société Anonyme at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1926. Klien also became one of the principal proponents of Cizek’s methods, training as a teacher under him before taking up a post at the Eizabeth Duncan School in Klessheim in Austria in 1926. She emigrated to the United States in 1929 and settled in New York where she taught at numerous art institutions as well as continuing her work as an artist.