Exhibitions
Gustav Klimt: Landscapes (Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, till 23 February)
Seductive and instructive
Elizabeth Clegg
Vienna in winter, with its freezing mists and early dusk, is the perfect foil for a spirit-lifting encounter with paintings acclaimed a century ago by Ludwig Hevesi (chief aphorist to the Secession) as Gustav Klimt's 'luminosities'. And the buoyant stateliness of the early 18th-century Upper Belvedere — built for the returning victor of the Turkish wars, in Klimt's day the Viennese residence of the ill-fated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and for the last eight decades home to the Austrian National Gallery — is both an apt and a thought-provoking venue for this event. The northand south-east first-floor enfilades, usually displaying the permanent collection of 'Art around 1900', provide an
elegantly self-effacing frame for a show that is well paced, accessibly narrated (in both English and German), and seductive and instructive in equal measure.
While by no means as novel as its organisers have claimed, the focus on Klimt as a landscapist is both organisationally ambitious and commercially timely, not least as a sequel to the highly successful survey of Klimt as a painter of women. Though not path-breaking in itself, the decision to link specific groups of pictures dating between 1897 and 1917 with Klimt's favoured summer vacation sites in the idyllic lake district of the Salzkammergut proves even better justified on the wall than on the page. The dominant tone, hovering between reverie and a diffuse sensuality, is established at the start with an enlarged detail from a photograph of 1903: here we find the artist in his preferred all-purpose garb, a loosefitting, full-length painter's smock, standing with friends on a small wooden dock by Lake Atter to greet two further companions passing in their skiff in the course of an early morning row.
As the 'atmospheric Impressionism' of the early orchards and meadows cedes, in 1900, to the greater detachment of the first pictures on which Klimt embarked while staying at the lakeside village of Litzlberg, the advent of the perfectly square canvas, the obtrusive element of design in the several birch and beech woods and, above all, the astonishing motivic 'emptiness' of 'On
the Attersee' reveal what industrious experimentation lay at the heart of these July, August or September holidays — a 'work habit' Klimt shared with innumerable creative contemporaries across AustriaHungary, be they musical, literary or scientific. Remaining surprisingly faithful to his chosen motifs (just how faithful is persuasively demonstrated in curator Stefan Koja's superb exhibition video), Klimt invariably recorded these in a way that also registered recent stylistic innovations in the wider world of art.
The turbulent, pointillist 'Tall Poplar: Approaching Thunderstorm' of 1902 is juxtaposed, in the third room, with a nod to the Central European 'discovery' of Van Gogh: two radiant sunflower paintings of 1907. By 1914-16 there is a faint echo of Cubism with the play of twoagainst threedimensional forms in views of the village of Unterach observed through a telescope from Weissenbach, across the lake. Subjects discovered during these Salzkammergut summers also helped Klimt towards perfection in the stylistic variant he was to make his own: his 'mosaic manner', a mature example of which is found in the glorious fruit-studded vault of foliage in 'Farmhouse in Upper Austria'.
Without a doubt, the greatest achievement of this pleasingly varied presentation lies in encouraging even the least motivated visitor to take the time to look. And the first lesson to be derived from that exercise is a realisation of how resistant to reproduction are the effects obtained through Klimt's idiosyncratic use of colour. In the 'Birchwood' of 1903 the curious festivity of the tones used to render the carpet of dead foliage (russets and browns, but also glowing blues, complex mauves and startling pinks) enters into combat with the almost malignantly vivid green of the moss that creeps up the pale, banded tree-trunks. Flecks of dampened gold within the dense vegetation flanking the lone, quasi-anthropomorphic sunflower bestow a ceremonial solemnity on this fantastical hybrid. The floral 'conflagration' in the right background of 'Farmhouse in Upper Austria' boosts the yellows in the late-summer meadow and thereby confirms an almost secretive reticence in the grey-stained boards, bench and shutters of the dwelling.
It is notable that this picture, emblematic of 'retreat' (from the pressures of life in the metropolis but also, as we can now perceive, from the encroaching menace of history), should enter Vienna's chief public art collection in 1912, during a period of retrenchment at that institution. A change of title (from Modern Gallery to Austrian State Gallery) and a related double shift of focus (from contemporary to primarily retrospective, from the international to the narrowly national) were predictable gestures of Austro-German cultural selfpreservation in response to competition from both beyond and within the Empire. But it is to Klimt's great credit that he largely resisted the new unadventurousness as he continued to develop as a painter. The seemingly entranced compositional opulence of his late work (the beginnings of which are detectable in the picture of 1911) was. indeed, to prompt some admirers to descry an aesthetic reconciliation of Orient and Occident. At the end of 1918, with Klimt in his grave and the old order in central Europe unravelling, this apparent universalism was briefly a beacon, signalling a potential new role for the visual culture of an errant. post-imperial Austria.
Previous page
