haberarts.com
art reviews from around new york

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, and I work this together with an earlier report on a close contemporary, Ferdinand Hodler, as a longer review and my latest upload.

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. 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 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.

Max Beckmann returned from World War I in his thirties, a mature artist and a broken man. His service as a medical orderly had ended prematurely, in metal and physical collapse, but his success had only just begun.

He found a ready market for his portraits in the freedom and sophistication of Weimar Germany. He found a subject, too, in the degradations he had witnessed and could not escape now. The Neue Galerie sees just eight years as a key to his more iconic later work. His mythic narratives arose, it argues, from the pleasures and poverty before his eyes.

New York got a good look at Beckmann in 2003, on what was just his most recent museum retrospective. One could call it political art, I wrote then, but his allegories never quite reveal their key. One could call it German Expressionism, but he himself would not, and his images rarely give up their sober colors, solid outlines, and mythic past. One could almost call it Modernism, but the tortured narratives, thick bodies, and grim faces scorn such experiments as well. A more recent exhibition took Beckmann into exile soon before his death. With your indulgence, I leave a fuller account to my reviews at the time, with more on his style, images, and career.

The Neue Galerie, in turn, offers not a survey, but a substantial correction, through January 15. It gives space to prints and drawings, at least half the show’s one hundred works. That is not a failing, because they were a big part of his output. Subjects could sit for them quickly and gain less costly access to his allegories, almost like the public for graphic novels today. And Beckmann responded to demand with large prints. He also, it turns out, was not just darkening his line with the medievalism of woodcuts. At least as often, he took to drypoint for quick, light hatching—finding echoes in the shocking skin tones of his paintings.

He could not let go of crushing memories. He sketches a morgue, a hospital, and open latrines. Nor could he stop looking. Cripples and beggars lay splayed or hunched on the street. Prints show the rising class that he deplored and with which he identified—those who sat for his portraits and attended the same supper clubs and carnivals. From past shows, you may know his early bathers after Paul Cézanne or later Vikings on a voyage of conquest. The wealthy, it turns out, could always rent a boat for the day.

It could not have been easy to enjoy each other’s company. You may remember Beckmann’s subjects as larger than life, himself included. Here, though, they pack the picture plane, with the lowest often upside down. It is only a step from an early Descent from the Cross to a carnival act. They hardly acknowledge one another as well—not even Adam and Eve at the temptation, where their tempter looks less like a serpent than a wolf. Jesus gestures to his followers as if putting them off.

Color comes as a corrective, too, to typical accounts of so dark an artist. It also came with success. One can see why he became the go-to guy for portraits. He does not have to flatter the new leisure class, not when he himself could aspire to a felt intelligence and self-possession. Maybe that is why they need few attributes, but Beckmann needs his tuxedo, cigarette, and horn. Art itself must have lifted him out of a breakdown.

He began teaching at the academy in Frankfurt, in 1925, and exhibited in Mannheim with the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity. Had he distanced himself from Expressionism or given it a lasting model, and what kind of “objectivity” could comport with his growing interest in theosophy? He still had to face the collapse of the republic. Yet the exhibition comes to an end well before the Nazis came to power, confiscated his art, and sent him packing. By then, it is hard to distinguish his Family Picture from his Dream. He had long since survived boredom, banality, and his own private hell.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.