The Free Spirit (PESN)

Your sense of beauty

Overflowing light, blinding gold, color vivid enough to take the eye. What draws you is work that leaps lightly over the laid track and over a dull morality to let human sensuality and beauty explode. However conservative people may point at it as scandalous, you are captivated by expression that trusts its own senses, invents one new technique after another, and pulls the audience into a whirl of excitement. Not merely keeping to the forms of the past, but pushing form open from inside with overflowing passion and repainting the world in a dazzling light — in that challenge you find the highest beauty.

What moves you

The live moment when a transcendent piano technique throws off sparks and the whole audience is swallowed into a whirl of excitement. Or standing before a painting where a figure rises out of geometric gold-leaf ornament and a sensual light shines dazzlingly across the surface.

The beauty you tend to overlook

A plain, quiet scene of ordinary life, or an unassuming presence with all showy staging pared away. Step a little back from overflowing stimulus and touch the quiet warmth sleeping inside something modest and unadorned; a new depth is added to your sensibility.

The composer in tune with you: Franz Liszt

Shaken by hearing Paganini play in 1832, Liszt honed a technique beyond any previous limit, and in the 1840s set off the fervor of "Lisztomania" across Europe. Expression in which particles of sound burst brilliantly across the keyboard resonates deeply with a sense of beauty that leaps past the frame of convention in search of overwhelming pleasure.

The painter who resonates with you: Gustav Klimt

Klimt founded the Vienna Secession in 1897 and drew public condemnation as "sensual and contrary to morality" for works such as his university ceiling paintings. In The Kiss, the embrace of a man and a woman is drawn amid dazzling gold leaf and vivid pattern. A surface that goes on challenging the limits of sensuality and beauty without fear of public criticism resonates strongly with your sensibility.

What links the two

There is no historical connection between the two. But they share a quality: in the conservative societies of Vienna and of Europe, setting up a scandalous sensuality and an innovative beauty that shook the public.

Three paintings for you

The Kiss

Gustav Klimt

Judith I

Gustav Klimt

Avenue in the Park of Schloss Kammer

Gustav Klimt