reprint from the Art of the Times, Dec. 2007 issue.
Gustav Klimt Takes Manhattan—Again!
A Glorious New Exhibition at the Neue Galerie Showcases Everyone’s Favorite Austrian Painter
by Sara Evans
From his seemingly endless trove of glittering prizes, Ronald Lauder has once again created an exhibition of staggering beauty. On October 18, 2007, the Neue Galerie opened “Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections,” with more than 150 drawings and paintings by the controversial artist on view together for the first time. The exhibit was organized by Renée Price, director of the Neue Galerie, and seeing these works together we realize what a startling innovator Gustav Klimt was—libertarian, eroticist, visionary, and consummate artist. It is clear that his influence is both profound and ongoing. The exhibition fills all the elegant, intimate galleries of Lauder’s beautiful boutique museum, and includes a meticulous reconstruction, complete with original furnishings, of one of the rooms from Klimt’s Vienna studio. The reconstruction provides an intimate sense of period and context in which to view Klimt’s beautiful drawings and paintings, his landscapes, figures, and portraits.
The Klimt paintings and drawings are a core component of the museum’s permanent holdings, a collection that was showcased and bolstered by Ronald Lauder’s record-breaking purchase of Klimt’s iconic “Adele Bloch-Bauer II” for $135 million in 2006. The painting was inspired by the Byzantine mosaics Klimt saw when he visited Ravenna, and is richly layered and intricately gilded. Its complex patterning of geometric squares, spirals, and mysterious fish eyes never fails to fascinate and intrigue. The subject herself is both sexy and saint-like, both come-hither and remote.
This 1912 painting of the wife of wealthy Viennese industrialist Ferdinand Block-Bauer, along with several others by Klimt, had been confiscated from the family by the Nazis in 1938. When she died suddenly of meningitis at the age of 43 in 1925, Adele Bloch-Bauer’s will expressed her desire (but was not a direct or specific bequest) that the painting be left to the people of Austria. The painting held pride of place in the Belvedere on the outskirts of Vienna. The restitution of these paintings was the subject of decades of litigation, which culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court agreeing to hear the case. Rather than subjecting themselves to yet another public airing of their murky past under the Nazi regime, the Austrian government ceded the case. The Bloch-Bauer heirs, who live in Los Angeles, sold the paintings at auction.
Klimt, who lived from 1862 to 1918, was one of the founders of the famed Viennese Secession movement and its love-child, the Wiener Werkstette, the Vienna workshops. Their work, like Klimt’s, was truly original. He was one of the giants of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century art. As the founder and first president of the Secession in 1897, Klimt was a central figure in the cultural life of Vienna’s Golden Age. As an artist, he provided a crucial link between nineteenth-century Symbolism and Modernism. He profoundly influenced successive generations of artists, including his student, Egon Schielethe; Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch; Paul Klee; and countless others. His sensual portrayals of women and richly patterned landscapes anticipated many of the formal advances of his peers. He pushed the boundaries of artistic expression and developed a unique pictorial vocabulary, drawing from many sources of the past to create a uniquely refined, delicate, and highly evocative style. Klimt’s work embodies the quintessence of fin de siècle Vienna.
No artist exists in a bell jar, and Klimt himself was strongly influenced by the pointillism of French Impressionists Paul Signac and Georges Seurat; by the intricate, gilded richness of Byzantine icons and mosaics; and by the lovely woodlands and villages that surrounded his native Vienna. His landscapes present a unique, yet contextual view of his world. Over and over again, he painted woods filled with birches, poplars, beeches, and pines carpeted with grasses in springtime and pointillist fallen leaves in autumn. He painted fields strewn with flowers, poppies and sunflowers, orchards in bloom and in fruit. His pictures are filled with fruit trees, chickens, barns, and farmhouses, quaint villages, lakeside castles, and rustic country villas. His earliest works, painted in a traditional, nineteenth century mode, were influenced by such Austrian painters as Emil Jacob Schindler and Marie Egner. These early Klimt landscapes are lovely—but altogether conventional. Towards the end of the 1890’s, Klimt began to hit his stride as a landscape artist, evolving his unique vision and style, and became at once more loose and more impressionistic, unique, and symbolic. Klimt’s landscapes make manifest the Austrian love of their countryside with its rotating seasons, its lakes, mountains, and forests, its orchards, farms, villages, and woodlands.
Klimt’s lifetime companion was the pretty and exuberant Emile Flöge who, together with her sisters, had a successful dressmaking atelier in Vienna where they made, among other things, the long, flowing “reform” smocks that were an important part of the Secessionist movement. Klimt and Flöge shared a fondness for this “reform” style of dress which they both designed that was so strongly advocated by members of the Secession—long, loose, flowing smocks. It was Emelie who enticed Klimt to the countryside each summer. Her family summered in a villa on the Attersee, a beautiful, glittering lake in Upper Austria, and it was there that Klimt created many of his loveliest landscape paintings. His paintings of the Attersee itself shimmer invitingly in luminous shades of turquoise and mauve, evoking and reflecting the work of Claude Monet.
By the early 1900’s, Klimt’s landscapes were so loose and impressionistic in style that they seem almost abstract. In 1906, a Van Gogh retrospective was held in Vienna and it is clear that Klimt was profoundly influenced by the artist and his work. Like the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, many of Klimt’s works from this time have a spinning, dizzying, and almost psychedelic quality. His flowers splash across the canvas; they fill the field of each picture without regard to traditional spatial conventions or perspectives.
Despite his penchant for wafting around in floaty garments, Gustav Klimt was definitely a ladies’ man. He was bearded and virile, tall and handsome and strong. Although the lively and lovely Emilie was a loyal and constant friend, confidante, and muse, as well as a portrait subject, their relationship is believed to have been a platonic one. That doesn’t mean Klimt was celibate; he had affairs with many of his models, and perhaps with more than one of the Viennese socialites he painted (including, it was rumored, Adele Bloch-Bauer herself). But his sister described him as a “loner,” because at the end of each day at his studio in Vienna, he came home to his mother and sisters, usually for supper and an early night. After his death in 1918, there were fourteen paternity claims against his estate; it is likely that Vienna is still teeming with little Klimts.
The landscapes exhibited are lovely, luminous, and rich. But it is in his paintings and drawings of women that the work of Gustav Klimt found its finest flowering, and it is his drawings and paintings of women for which he will be most remembered. They are, each and every one of them, quite simply, gorgeous. Many of the Klimt’s drawings and painting push the envelope—hard; showing women together in erotic lesbian poses, heads thrown back, clearly ecstatic. Staid Vienna was, of course, shocked by these works. However, the rumors that raged about this libidinous artist made the women of the Viennese haute bourgeoisie line up to have their portraits painted by him. These society-lady paintings were Klimt’s bread and butter. The earliest ones are conventional in technique and pose, but the figures in Klimt’s later portraits are charged with eroticism, beautifully figured, well-dressed, and dripping with jewelry.
Then there are the mythic paintings, the beautiful “Judith,” with “temptress” written all over her, his most famous painting, “The Kiss,” “Water Snakes,” “The Virgin,” and “Danaë.” These paintings are unique and amazing. They convey the artist’s own view and interpretation of the world, of the unseen powers that move and motivate us. In these powerful paintings, Gustav Klimt has taken the invisible and the unknowable—and for all time has made them visible, for all of us to see.
“Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections”
is on view until June 30, 2008 at the Neue Galerie, Fifth Avenue and 86th Street, New York. A lavishly illustrated catalogue published by Prestel accompanies the exhibition. (www.neuegalerie.org)