5.6.24 — From Behind the Curtain
In truth, “Klimt Landscapes” has little in the way of landscapes. It hardly needs them.
The Neue Galerie begins elsewhere, with its magnificent collection of Austrian and German Expressionism and its ongoing display of portraits by Gustav Klimt, including one of its most precious holdings. How could it not take pride in a portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer from 1907, in its patterned gold? One hardly knows whether she is sitting or standing—and whether those triangles and eyes to her dress, her lavish interior, her own brilliance, 
or the Austrian artist’s inner world. The portrait’s gallery has its richness as well, with still functioning clocks by Adolf Loos, earlier Klimt portraits in their black clothing and pallor, and two works by Carl Moll. Moll’s brighter, crisper outdoor portraits absorb the lessons of Impressionism as Klimt never could. Upstairs, the show itself displays the full range of his interests and where in the landscape they took him, through May 6.
Born in 1862, Klimt came of age when academic training was a must and Symbolism was a movement. They left the young artist searching for a place between tradition and Modernism, and at first he tried to combine them. He could draw nudes and tell stories just fine, much like an older artist, even if one cannot make out the fables. He was to develop separate pursuits of allegory, portraiture, and landscapes, but already he was chafing at the limits of distinct genres. They all fed his psychologically charged landscapes. So did his love of patterning, whether in Symbolism itself or his celebrated later portraits.
So, too, did his artistic circle, and I work this together with an earlier report on a close contemporary, Ferdinand Hodler, as a longer review and my latest upload. He was there at the start with the Vienna Secession and Vienna Camera Club in the 1880s. The first insisted on a break with the old, the second on heading out of doors. Remarkably, the medium also sustained his growing interest in color. Decades before true color photography, he printed with multiple dyes to convincing effect. Not coincidentally, his works on paper favor collotypes, a process involving light-sensitive chemicals brushed on metal and glass plates—like a cross between photographs and lithographs.
One last inner circle was smaller still. Emilie Flöge, the sister of Klimt’s sister-in-law, founded a workshop for her fashion design. Neue Galerie includes jewelry as well as prints and paintings. While they never lived together or married, they headed together to the country, where he posed often for the camera with the beard and robe of a Greek philosopher. Then as now, all the right people fled the summer heat and urban crowds, and Klimt, too, traveled among the right people, like his patrons. Then, too, who would want to return when avoiding the crowds left the city so empty?
Even an artist deserves a break, and a vacation can bring a breakthrough in art. Pablo Picasso (whom the Met has displayed alongside Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele) headed for Fontainebleau to find his way to Three Musicians, Three Women, and what might come after Cubism. Klimt, too, made the best of time to himself. Portraits earned him a reputation, but landscapes were pretty much his alone. Summer holidays took him to Austria’s lake district, home to chapels, castles, and well-off homes, and all appear in his paintings. They just happen to lurk behind entire curtains of greenery, just as Adele Bloch Bauer emerges in gold.
The curator, Janis Staggs, describes his landscapes as an evolution from a misty Impressionism to decorative patterns. The exhibition itself leaves the first to reproductions in a helpful time line—and to his portraits. Its actual landscapes begin instead with Large Poplar Tree I in 1900. Its thick trunk and diverging leaves might belong to a single demon or three giants, while glints of color at its base might be eyes of still more hauntings. This is one animated landscape. By Klimt’s Park at Kammer Castle in 1909 and Forester’s House in Weissenbach II (Garden) in 1914, the curtain had already descended.
In defiance of gravity, a clearing at the base of the curtain may look onto a building’s windows, a pond, an animated cluster of thin trees—and the light. Above, flecks of color within the greenery make it a monumental source of its own light. Klimt died soon after, in 1916, far too soon for Hitler to declare work like this “degenerate art.” Still, his overlapping circles included Jewish patrons, and the Neue Galerie describes how the Nazis looted its prized portrait, only later restored to the family’s descendants and repurchased for New York. But then the Jewish Museum has told the story of Nazi-looted art, too. Here it all appears, as if by magic, from behind the green curtain.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.