Thoughts on Gustav Klimt (Part 1)
Why a New York exhibition of his work isn’t what it says it is
My first article in a real periodical (i.e., a periodical devised by someone other than me) was published when I was 16. I hadn’t intended for it to be published; it was a short essay that I’d done on assignment for my high-school Latin class. After reading it, my teacher proudly submitted it to the Pompeiiana Newsletter, a monthly publication for Latin instructors, which printed it in May 1988. The subject was a famous passage from Cicero’s Tusculanae Disputationes that introduces the concept of the sword of Damocles: Dionysius, king of Syracuse, has the sword in question hung right over his courtier’s head to show him how uncomfortable the life of a paranoid king can be. The headline I gave the essay was “Dionysius Acumen Facit” (Dionysius Makes the Point). The Pompeiiana Newsletter’s editor appended a subhead that I found, and still find, wonderfully droll: “High School Student Tries Textual Criticism.”
That fragment of personal history came to mind just now as I sat down to compose a few words about Austrian painter Gustav Klimt, by whom I’ve long been fascinated but about whom I’ve never written at length. Give this one the subhead “Music Journalist Tries Art Criticism.”
A couple of days ago, my wife and I went to see an exhibition called Klimt Landscapes that’s currently on show at New York’s Neue Galerie. Klimt’s landscape paintings—most of which date from the final 20 years of his life (1898-1918) and were inspired by summer scenes in various locations along Austria’s third-largest lake, the Attersee—aren’t often seen in America, but to me they are the pinnacle of his work. Though clearly showing the influence of Seurat’s pointillism and Monet’s burnished haziness, Klimt goes further than either of these predecessors, letting his colors run riot and nearly, though never completely, explode the form. My favorite canvases of his in this vein are his 1902 and 1903 depictions of birch and beech forests, which seem to have a constant low-level glow, forming dark combinations of hue that I for one have never seen in an actual forest. Overlapping tree trunks challenge the viewer’s perspective: Which ones are closer and which farther? Some sections of trunk appear solid while others flicker mirage-like. Are they all really there? What does “really there” even mean in this context?
In short, a Klimt landscape is a dose of enhanced reality, a psychedelic experience without drugs. To walk into a room full of them—as one can at the Belvedere museum in the artist’s hometown of Vienna—is to be overwhelmed and transported. That was what I was expecting from the Neue Galerie exhibition. But that was not what I got.
The show, again, is called Klimt Landscapes. This is a woeful misnomer. Of the many works on display in five galleries, only 10 are landscape paintings, and only five of those date from Klimt’s prime. To be fair, other landscapes, including one of the forests, can be seen here, as presented in collotype photographs on the sumptuous pages of the 1908-1914 portfolio Das Werk von Gustav Klimt. Only 300 copies of this book were made—Frank Lloyd Wright owned one!—and many have subsequently been lost or split, so its presence at the Neue Galerie is both significant and beautiful. But it’s still a poor substitute for actual canvases. And even if you add in the collotypes, landscape paintings are greatly outnumbered by other Klimt works and multiple cases containing pretty but unnecessary items like Vienna Secession catalogs, Josef Hoffmann jewelry and Koloman Moser furniture, ostensibly to provide historical background but really to provide padding.
What happened here? Most of Klimt’s landscapes reside in Europe, and it seems that nearly every European institution approached by the Neue Galerie for this exhibition refused to loan out their works. (The one exception: Prague’s National Gallery.) I can think of a few reasons why this would be. First, money. Due in part to the past actions of the Neue Galerie’s co-founder, multibillionaire cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder, who famously paid $135 million for Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I—at the time (2006) the most money ever spent to acquire a single painting—any work of Klimt now carries a hefty price tag, meaning that insurance and transportation costs for a truly representative landscape exhibition would be through the roof. More, I presume, than even a multibillionaire cosmetics magnate wants to spend.
Second, the Neue Galerie itself. Lauder’s vision for the museum—to provide a refined New York setting for German and Austrian art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—is noble, and I cheer it. But this, lest we forget, is a private institution that too often behaves like … well, a private institution. It bans children under the age of 12 from its galleries (which required an exemption from New York City’s age discrimination laws). It charges $28 a head and $325 for a membership with paltry extra benefits. And where exactly is this money going? To help Lauder add to the millions of dollars he’s already given to isolationist and xenophobic Republican political candidates, including his college pal Donald Trump?1 Loaning works to such an organization may not be all that good a look for foreign institutions outside of Russia or Hungary at the moment.
Third, lingering sour grapes on the part of Austria’s government. I previously mentioned Lauder’s $135 million purchase of the Adele Bloch-Bauer portrait, often called “The Woman in Gold.” He bought the painting because 1) he loved it and wanted to own it, 2) he envisioned it as the centerpiece of his museum (which it has been for nearly two decades), and 3) he wished to keep it out of the hands of the Austrian state, which had already held on to it for more than 60 years without an acknowledgment that it had been stolen from its rightful owner.
A brief summary of a complex story that’s been the subject of multiple books and films: In 1903, Klimt was commissioned to paint Bloch-Bauer’s portrait by her husband Ferdinand—it took him four years to complete the gaudy canvas. The Bloch-Bauers were wealthy Viennese Jews, and although Adele didn’t live to see the Nazi Anschluss (she died in 1925), Ferdinand suffered from it immeasurably. Charged falsely with tax evasion in 1938, he was stripped of his assets, including six Klimt paintings; forced to flee Austria, he was still in exile in Switzerland when he died in 1945. The Nazi authorities eventually transferred all six Bloch-Bauer Klimts to the Belvedere in Vienna, a state institution, with the explanation that it had been Adele’s wish. Although this was true to some extent—Adele’s will had included a stipulation that the paintings be left to the museum after her husband’s death—the paintings were Ferdinand’s property, not hers, and at the time he was very much alive.
Decades of postwar litigation ensued between Austria and the Bloch-Bauer family, during which the Klimt paintings continued to hang at the Belvedere. Finally, in January 2006, a panel of arbitrators ruled that five of the six paintings, including “The Woman in Gold,” should be returned to the Bloch-Bauer estate. Six months later, following an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that included the five Klimts, Ferdinand and Adele’s niece Maria Altmann sold Adele Bloch-Bauer I to Lauder.
Now, as some of what I’m written above has indicated, I’m not Ronald Lauder’s biggest fan. But I should note that he’s always been a fervent supporter of Jewish causes and organizations, and that with his purchase of “The Woman in Gold” he made a statement on several levels, not just in the amount of money spent but in what that money symbolized: a refusal to continue letting non-Jews profit from Jewish property looted by antisemites. In this, he was both righteous and morally correct, and New York City has benefited from his actions. Having said that, I don’t think it takes much to imagine the Austrian government—which still owns many Klimt works, including several that would have enlivened the Neue Galerie’s exhibition—being less than kindly disposed toward Lauder at this point. Austria wants the world to associate the great Klimt with his home country, which is understandable; the more attention he gets, after all, the less goes to other native sons like, say, Adolf Hitler or Kurt Waldheim. To some degree, Lauder has at least figuratively stood in the way of Austria celebrating itself, and led the world to question whether such a celebration is warranted.
Perhaps these are the reasons for the dearth of European loans, perhaps not. But in any case, the Neue Galerie’s Klimt Landscapes exhibition is not an exhibition of Klimt landscapes and should have been retitled. Seen on its own semi-questionable terms, it isn’t bad—Patricia Smith at The New York Times viewed it more favorably than I did—and if you’re not all that familiar with Klimt and/or have never seen his landscapes, it’s a decent point of entry; the paintings that are included, especially 1909’s The Park (owned by the Museum of Modern Art) and 1903’s Pear Trees (usually seen at Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum), are very good. But if you know Klimt and this work well, you’ll be disappointed.
For my wife and I, the disappointment continued after our visit to the Neue Galerie when we went looking for a reasonably informed documentary on Klimt—but that’ll be the subject of my next installment.
Lauder announced in 2022 that he would not support Trump’s 2024 presidential run, but he has donated at least $1.75 million, either directly or indirectly via political action committees, to past Trump campaigns.
Thanks for this show review Mac. I'm an admirer of Klimt, although clearly one with only superficial knowledge of his work's context. You give invaluable perspective to anyone going in. After reading this, I very well may still take in the show -- just much better informed than I otherwise would have been.
Great to get your visual art take. Looking forward to more!