Klimt Landscapes Glisten and Glitter in a New York Exhibition

But why no Austrian loans for the Neue Galerie show? Enquiring minds want to know.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Matthew Wong / Vincent Van Gogh: Painting as a Last Resort at the Van Gogh Museum. Wong (1984–2019) was a savant who absorbed and recalibrated many muses, dead and alive, to make some very beautiful art. The Van Gogh Museum, naturally, focused — not entirely — on Van Gogh as an inspiration, but I’d say that the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) was a model for Wong, who was both voracious and analytical. Coincidentally, a week or so before I saw the Amsterdam exhibition, I had visited the Neue Galerie in New York and its new Klimt Landscapes exhibition.

Klimt is famous for The Kiss and the Neue Galerie’s own Adele Bloch-Bauer I, whose ownership was the impetus for the movie Woman in Gold. He’s also known mostly as a figure painter specializing in high-society women and femme fatales and as the star of the Austrian Secession movement from the 1890s until his death in 1918.

Klimt was a sublime painter of landscapes, flowers, and lake scenes as well, and most Americans don’t know this. Klimt Landscapes develops a social and biographical context for these objects, painted in dabs of dazzling color, each dab a jewel, at times as dense as virgin woods but sometimes gauzy and ethereal.

I liked it, as I do all of the Neue Galerie’s exhibitions. The museum is among my favorites for its extraordinary, sublime, and focused permanent collection of Austrian and German art, classy presentation, and Old World setting in a plush townhouse on Fifth Avenue and 86th Street. There’s a missed opportunity here, sad to say, and it might not be the museum’s fault, but it’s the museum’s problem.

There are two basic problems, one for the exhibition, and one for me. The missed opportunity first. Klimt painted around 60 landscapes between 1897 and 1916. Only eight are in Klimt’s Landscapes. There’s also a suite of landscape prints, but they’re not in color, and in this case there’s no substitute for the real thing. Vibrant color and paint handling are that essential. As for me, I worked on the last Klimt landscape exhibition, at the Clark and the Galerie Belvedere in Vienna in 2002. I know too much, especially about how disingenuous and grasping the Belvedere was and how shady Austrians — especially private collectors — are when it comes to Nazi provenance.

For the show, the Clark partnered with the Belvedere, Austria’s premier modern-art museum. On the Clark’s end, we ran into Austria’s Holocaust restitution hysteria and buzzsaw. No Austrian collector or museum would lend Klimts to America, fearing that their pictures would be confiscated and held hostage. The casus belli was the lawsuit in American courts over the Belvedere’s ownership of five Klimts swiped by the Nazi government from the Bloch-Bauer family, who were among Klimt’s patrons. The movie Woman in Gold tells the tale of the lawsuit, Maria Altmann, the Bloch-Bauer heir and plaintiff, and Adele Bloch-Bauer I, Klimt’s 1907 portrait, on view at the Neue one floor below Klimt Landscapes.

The Clark exhibition was severely truncated while the Belvedere was chockablock with Klimt landscapes. The Belvedere pulled its own landscapes from the Clark, though they were as free of Nazi taint as Winston Churchill. What a bunch of rats.

Since 2002, the Bloch-Bauer lawsuit was settled — Altmann got her Klimts — and the restitution panic has eased. I assumed that the Neue Galerie would show an abundance of these gorgeous landscapes, little known in America and, I think, the glittering jewels of the Austrian Secession. Nein. It’s showing only eight, fewer than even the 13 the Clark managed to corral. Why?

Why is a good question, since Klimt Landscapes has what seems to be lots of filler, and this includes a ton of photographs of Klimt and his friends, timelines, didactics, costumes, and work by other artists. That’s a lot of stuff, and in spots it’s a jumble. I’m from an academic-museum background so I like the omnium and gatherum look, but it’s too much and against the Secession aesthetic.

It’s not the end of the world. Visitors will learn a lot about Klimt’s biography. They’ll fall in love with the landscapes. Park at Kammer Castle, from 1909, is the cover image of the catalogue. It’s owned by the Neue Galerie, which doesn’t explain completely why it gets star treatment. It’s in pristine condition, and, dated smack in the middle of Klimt’s time painting landscapes, it covers lots of issues.

I’d call it a glistening, meditative painting, big and square, as are most of his landscapes, so it absorbs us. Klimt liked the 47-inch-square format. He often used a viewfinder to fix himself on a motif, and viewfinders lend themselves to squares. Big square landscapes have presence, because of size, obviously, but landscapes are normally horizontal rectangles, which emphasizes expansiveness. The square is a simple, assertive form, too, and works well with Secession-era interior design. Klimt’s patrons weren’t buying his art for packed, dark Victorian interiors. They were displaying his pictures in rooms designed by, say, Josef Hoffmann, Klimt’s kindred spirit — rooms free of clutter and useless ornament, with clean lines, lots of geometry, and passages of fetching color here and there.

Park at Kammer Castle is composed in a grid, with shoreline, lake, and grasses forming strong horizontals and one tree and two long shadows on the lake vertically intersecting them. Another tree, dense with leaves, is itself a square within a square. The colors are lush, mostly greens but with dabs of blue, purple, yellow, orange, red, and black. Tiny openings in the landscape give depth. The water is more thinly painted, and I was surprised to see lots of the white primer Klimt used to prepare his canvas as well as so much canvas weave. Dabs are sometimes so tiny they seem like wispy clouds. Yes, they’re lying there, on the surface, but they seem to float. Sometimes he uses the tiniest flecks of paint landing on the crest of the canvas’s bumpy weave. These flecks catch the light.

It’s peak Klimt. As ethereal, luminous beauty, it’s hard to match. Seeing it and two or three of the other landscapes will slacken the jaw in wonder and reverence.

Though Sonja Knips, the Bloch-Bauers, the Lederers, the Primavesis, the Wittgensteins, and the Zuckerkandls — all of whom commissioned Klimt portraits — also owned landscapes, Klimt didn’t paint them on commission. He painted them usually during his long summer vacations by the Attersee, one of Austria’s “Great Lakes” and a four-hour train trip due west of Vienna. His Sommerfrisches, or long summer breaks, were sacred to him and many upper-middle-class Viennese.

Klimt painted landscapes initially to keep busy and to keep his artist’s mind keen and, later, to make extra money. These vacation pictures were also freedom pictures. Unfettered by patron quirks, he experimented with his own version of Pointillism and, a bit later, a mosaic style with paint applied in geometric shapes. He painted scenes close to the house he rented for the summer. He sometimes painted series — the same subject from a different angle or in different light — and, in the 1910s, added architecture and gardens as motifs.

There are just enough paintings in Klimt Landscapes to cover many of the core points about his landscapes. The Neue Galerie’s Large Poplar I, from 1900, is an atmosphere picture with trees sharing the scene with dense clouds and passages of cobalt sky, both suggesting that a storm might be brewing. Monet’s landscapes inspired Klimt for a while. This picture suggests Klimt’s interest early in his landscape career in changing weather.

Pear Tree, from 1903 is also in the show. It belongs to Harvard. Klimt had just visited Ravenna in Italy and adored the sixth-century mosaics at the Church of San Vitale. I’d call the painting Pointillist and indebted to Seurat, Signac, and Maximilian Luce. Like the old mosaicists, though, he eliminates shadows and weather moods, economizes on perspective and depth, and emphasizes a sweeping plane of pure color dabs. The pear tree is packed with fruit, but the painting, overall, is less temporal and more decorative.

These Pointillist landscapes — The Park from MoMA is another — are the high points of the show. Especially in his treatment of reflections in water, Klimt drew from Monet, but he’s his own thing. The MoMA painting is close to completely abstract. It’s a sweep of dabs, some small, some big enough to be called paint strokes. Only at the bottom is there a thin, horizontal line of tree trunks both for depth and to tell us that it’s a landscape. It’s from 1909, a few years after Pear Tree, and shows Klimt pushing his mosaic style nearly into all-over abstraction, like something Mark Tobey would paint 50 years later.

Three landscapes in the show have significant architecture. Kammer Castle on the Attersee IV, from 1910, and Castle in the Lake, from 1908, are water-reflection scenes. They’re more conventional than The Park. Forester’s House in Weissenbach II (Garden), from 1914, is done in what is, for Klimt, an evolved style, with the dots, dabs, and daubs less present and paint applied in blocks as in Cézanne’s work.

Posthumous Portrait of Ria Munk III, from about 1917, is unfinished and not a landscape but a full-length portrait. Still, it’s got an abstract flower garden for a background and, at least on the day I visited, seemed a big draw. I think I was in the gallery with an art-school class. The students, all young adults, loved Klimt’s swirls of charcoal drawing, which make the preliminary design of the figure’s dress.

Forester’s House isn’t quite there yet, but it tells us that Klimt was moving toward patterns and compositions that aren’t based on grids. The Ria Munk picture and late landscapes not in the exhibition seem to be inspired by stained glass or, as the catalogue proposes, colorful and patterned textiles made in rural parts of Austria’s far-flung empire.

Klimt died in 1918 of influenza following a stroke, and though he was only 56, he seems to have run out of gas as an artist. He never married — he lived with his mother and two spinster sisters — but managed over the years to have three mistresses and multiple children. He died as Austria’s empire crumbled and as the new, post-war, avant-garde zeitgeist was emerging. He seemed to have gone on his eternal Sommerfrische at the right time.

Square brooches with semiprecious stones in geometric shapes are displayed in cases. Designed by Hoffmann, they’re pretty and mostly from the time of Pear Tree and Park at Kammer Castle. Hoffmann was making jewelry inspired from Klimt’s paintings while Klimt painted landscapes that themselves looked like an arrangement of jewelry. It’s a nice comparison.

I’d never paid much attention to Klimt’s collotypes, a big project for him in the 1910s. Das Werks Gustav Klimts was his print portfolio, issued in installments in his lifetime and reissued right after his death. The prints are based on his greatest hits, among them Pallas Athena, The Kiss, a couple of portraits, and half a dozen landscapes. Some are in color, but most are in gauzy black-and-white tones. These Klimt drawings, none landscapes, help give us an overview of the artist.

Though much of the exhibition is biographical, it isn’t all regurgitated material. I was so immersed in Klimt studies for so long that I needed the reminder from the book and the show that Klimt was a private person and didn’t foreground himself. “If you want to know me, look at my art,” he said. What emerges from both the landscapes and the biographical part of the exhibition is an artist who wasn’t a psycho and, for a city slicker, was exceptionally tuned to nature.

So what’s missing? Klimt’s landscapes from 1916 are heavy on patterning and architecture. Church in Cassone, from 1913, is a Lake Garda scene. There, the lakeside is developed with villas that creep up steep cliffs. Klimt does more formal gardens and, as early as 1910, starts to emphasize tree trunks, eventually gnarly ones painted in thick strokes similar to Van Gogh’s. The Swamp is from 1900. It’s in a private collection. In this, Klimt was in his somber and creepy phase. The Lord of the Rings’ Gollum would have felt right at home. And there’s Sunflower from 1907, owned by the Belvedere. It’s Klimt’s one landscape with gold leaf.

Island in the Attersee, from 1902, which I profiled last year when it sold at auction for $53 million, is, in my opinion, among the zeniths of art. I’ve been known to think about it like a dog thinks of food. It wasn’t there, but I didn’t expect it. A monied titan just bought it and isn’t going to give it up so soon.

What happened? I don’t think any Austrians, public or private, lent to the Neue. My sense is that the mood isn’t much less icy than it was in 2002 when the Clark couldn’t get Austrian loans. People living in fallen empires tend to forget nothing, noodling grievances far beyond what Americans, a forward-moving people, would see as their expiration date.

And the avalanche of restitutions might have slowed, but they’re still happening. In 2021, the Musée d’Orsay returned a Klimt landscape because of Holocaust provenance problems. A dozen American museums fought a big Schiele restitution case — the Fritz Grünbaum claim — until surrendering their art last year.

Though Klimt’s and Schiele’s works were made in the 20th century, their ownership history is murky. Discoveries keep happening, a slip of paper here, a goose-stepping evildoer suddenly noticed there. In Hogan’s Heroes, Sargent Schultz, the German prisoner-of-war camp guard, proclaimed “I know nothing” every episode. Austrian Klimt owners will add, “I’ll lend nothing,” especially to America, which wages lawfare. It’s not lost on Austrians that our legal system is rotten with politics.

What surprises me the most about Klimt Landscapes is that the Galerie Belvedere, which still owns a dozen landscapes, lent nothing. Having restituted some landscapes already, you’d think that what they still have would be free of Nazi fingerprints. The director and curator at the Belvedere at the time of the Clark exhibition are gone. Possibly the Belvedere resents the Neue Galerie, which has acquired so much of the marquee that the Belvedere was forced to return. Losing the resplendent portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer was a bitter pill.

Klimt Landscapes, a big, complex show, took years to organize. The Covid crisis arrived in what would have been the middle of planning the art that was to be shown and the catalogue. Possibly the path of least inconvenience at the Belvedere was to crawl into its shell. It’s a government-run museum, after all.

Visiting the Neue Galerie is the closest thing to a trip to Vienna, including the schnitzel, bratwurst, glühwein, and Sacher torte in the restaurant. The galleries are always beautiful. The Neue Galerie specializes in both German and Austrian art, but I’m smitten by Vienna. Yes, most Austrians were Nazis, but the art of Vienna from the 1860s to the start of World War I is elegant and romantic but with a bite. Vienna, the heart of an empire, attracted and amalgamated the aesthetics of dozens of cultures. Near Venice and Russia, and not far from its frenemy the Turks, Vienna absorbed even more.

Though not comprehensive and despite its detours and filler, Klimt Landscapes is a treat. The book is sumptuous, with important essays on photography in Klimt’s circle and Klimt’s technique. All of the Neue Galerie’s books are good, but with Klimt, illustration quality is so important. That his landscapes sparkle is made very clear.