Klimt Landscape Show Is More, and Less, Than Expected

It was exciting to look forward to the exhibition “Klimt Landscapes,” now at the Neue Galerie. Klimt, of course, is Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), the Austrian modernist widely beloved for his paintings of the most beautiful women of Vienna’s haute bourgeoisie.

In the best portraits, ethereal creatures wear lavishly patterned gowns that all but merge with backgrounds of off-kilter geometries often accented by gold, silver and copper leaf, inspired by the mosaics of Ravenna. Their pinnacle is the glittering 1907 “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” — depicting one of Klimt’s greatest collectors as delicate yet regal — which has been on permanent display on the Neue Galerie’s second floor since the museum’s founder, Ronald S. Lauder, acquired it for $135 million in 2006.

But “Klimt Landscapes,” on the third floor, is not what it set out to be. The title implies a sizable survey of the lush images of parks, orchards and sundry trees that Klimt painted in the last two decades of his life, usually during summers spent on the Attersee, the largest lake in Austria’s resort region. These works are not well known in the United States, nor are there many in American museums. Still, the exhibition of 10 landscapes at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., in 2002, was the first anywhere to focus on them exclusively.

In contrast, the Neue’s exhibition — curated by Janis Staggs of the museum — contains just five late landscapes, and not always the best, since half of them center on vine-covered forest cottages and lakeside villas and can be cloying. Also on view are five smaller paintings from the 1880s to 1900 that touch on Klimt’s development from the romanticized academicism evident in the public murals to his late landscapes.

In these landscapes, naturalism and abstraction often battle to a pulsating draw by means of a magnified, or coarsened pointillism that recalls Seurat in its mosaic-like array of dots, dashes and commas. Klimt painted directly onto the canvas, in contrast to the portraits, which required numerous studies. The resulting masses of textured greens have weight and press forward, sometimes nearly filling the entire surface.

With the exception of Monet, few artists in this period made landscape paintings as radical as Klimt’s — at least those without buildings. To a degree, his modernist topiary foreshadows the prominent wholeness of Abstract Expressionist painting, especially Pollock’s allover drips and Rothko’s big blocks of color. You see this in “The Park” (1909), in the show’s final gallery which is, fittingly, owned by the Museum of Modern Art, the cartographer of orthodox modernism.

In the decades leading up to the turn of the 20th-century, Klimt went from being a prominent, officially approved artist (the kind who receives public commissions) to being a highly successful leader of Vienna’s very active avant-garde, living primarily on private commissioned portraits. He was a founder and the first president of the Vienna Secession, essentially an artists’ association and exhibition space formed in 1897, to counter the stodginess of the city’s art establishment.

In 1903 two Secession members (and friends of Klimt) — the architect Josef Hoffmann and the designer Koloman Moser — helped found the Wiener Werkstätte with the aim of elevating the applied arts to the level of the fine arts and combining them in unified interiors. Among their specialties were geometric patterns, without which it is hard to imagine those in Klimt’s paintings. (And without those patterns, his portraits would dwell more in the realm of Sargent or Whistler.)

It’s not immediately clear why there are so few late landscapes in the Neue show, especially since the catalog reproduces many more. But reading the labels’ credit lines always pays off.

Most museums holding Klimt’s late landscapes are in Europe, but only one of them, the National Gallery Prague, has lent to the Neue. All the others seem to have decided that the world is too unstable to let important pictures travel to the U.S.

The Neue declined to answer questions on this subject. But it seems that the exhibition started out one way and pivoted, given the discrepancy between the paintings in the catalog and those on the walls. And it seems equally clear that the Neue was uniquely equipped to meet the crisis. The show is, weirdly, a triumph, especially if you love exhibitions that go a bit overboard on context.

Drawing primarily from its own holdings, the Neue has surrounded the few Klimt landscapes on hand with clusters of visual and archival material, some of it refreshingly unfamiliar. This includes photographs from family snapshots to fancy collotype reproductions of Klimt’s paintings, and enough pictures of the artist to make him the first modern art star. Also here: examples of Werkstätte furniture, jewelry and silverwork and related garments; posters and postcards. It is like so many dots waiting to be connected: Together they coalesce into an unusually intimate view of Klimt’s life, work and milieu.

Perhaps the most important element foregrounded here is Klimt’s longtime (possibly platonic) relationship with Emilie Flöge, his muse and collaborator and a fashion designer in her own right. With her two sisters she formed Schwestern Flöge, an au courant design salon that catered to fashion-forward Viennese women. One gallery here contains furnishings from their shop: one vitrine displaying Werkstätte jewelry, including some pieces originally owned by Flöge, and a white proto-Minimalist table, both designed by Moser.

This gallery also contains “Pear Trees” of 1903, one of Klimt’s first landscapes in his Pointillist-influenced late style. But Klimt’s dotting has its own spirit; it is both chaotic and more naturalistic. Seurat’s careful pairing of two colors to create a third is out the window. Klimt’s relatively wild dots are punctuated by lots of light-green pears and then shrink to virtual atoms of color for the distant hedges.

Flöge helped design the full, flowing garment known as the Reform dress that freed women from corsets and came to be associated with the Werkstätte. These dresses were closely related to the floor-length smock that Klimt is seen wearing in many photographs, especially those taken during the summers spent at the Attersee with Flöge and her family.

Among the more fascinating inclusions are 26 of the 51 small collotype photographs from the portfolio “Das Werk von Gustav Klimt” — divided among the show’s three galleries. They float in the background, forming a sotto voce review of Klimt’s painting career. Here you’ll find more of his transitional landscapes from the late 1890s and recurring compositional devices. One is the isolation of a vertical cluster of figures or flowers at the centers of the some paintings, whether landscapes like “Sunflower,” or one of his most famous figurative works, “The Kiss.” Collotypes of the two hang side by side in the show’s second gallery.

Some of Klimt’s paintings exist today only in the collotype reproductions. Several originals were destroyed in World War II; others were reworked. For example, Klimt’s portrait of Emilie Flöge from 1902-03, seen here in collotype, was one of his earliest decorative portraits. Sometime after it was photographed for the portfolio, Klimt reworked it, bringing it up to speed with his more recent ones. He intensified the blue, splintered its motifs into finer, more mosaic-like patterns and added the sparkle of silver.

As you proceed through this show, dots connect in visual as well as historical terms. The installation makes it unusually clear that Hoffmann’s famous brooches are little gardens with flowers and trees that are in conversation with Klimt’s landscapes — which, like them, are also square, emphasizing their modernity.

You may find another connection of this sort when you reach the show’s third and final gallery, where the five late landscapes almost seem to fill the entire space with their dense foliage. Some of the trunks in these pictures have sinuous trunks of brown, splotched green, black and gray.

Between their curves and slightly hallucinatory patterns, they evoke some of Klimt’s portrait subjects and their flowing garments. As if to bear witness to this unexpected connection, Klimt’s unfinished “Portrait of Ria Munk III” (1917-1918) hangs on an adjacent wall, a near life-size image of a dark-haired woman in a loose flowered robe that is roughly penciled in. Behind her are bands of flowers variously real or stylized or morphing into decorative objects, a veritable sketch of the Secession-Werkstätte achievement.

I doubt there have been many Klimt exhibitions like this invigorating, fortuitous survey of his life and times, with its unusually effective use of extreme context. By the time you reach the final gallery to savor the admittedly small group of late landscapes, you may have a different idea of how many paintings are needed to carry a show of this size and still make sense. I did.

Klimt Landscapes

Through May 6, Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; 212-628-6200, neuegalerie.org.