Vienna and Gustav Klimt

Vienna's beloved bohemian
A missing masterpiece -- sold for a record sum -- can't alter the impact of Gustav Klimt's tumultuous life and iconic art on his gallery-rich home town
Deanna MacDonald
The Globe and Mail, July 22, 2006

VIENNA -- Klimt and Vienna go together like coffee and strudel. Gustav Klimt was an avant-garde artist with a taste for femmes fatales and a bohemian lifestyle, and his gilded paintings of seductive women and devouring kisses capture the wild atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna.

Although he has been dead for nearly 90 years and Vienna is no longer the hedonistic capital of a dying empire (it is, in fact, ranked as one of the world's most livable cities, just behind Vancouver), Klimt is still part of modern Vienna. On a recent stay in the city, I discovered that you can't go far without running into him -- the places he lived and hung out as well as the artworks that made him one of Vienna's favourite sons.

"The Viennese love Klimt," said Eva Draxler, spokeswoman for the Vienna Tourist Board. "He's a symbol of the city."
In February, when the city learned that five Klimt paintings -- including the iconic Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer -- would be returned to the Los Angeles-based heir of the Bloch-Bauer family, the Viennese flocked in the thousands to the Belvedere Gallery for one last glimpse of the departing pictures. The Bloch-Bauer portrait recently sold for a record-breaking $153-million and now hangs in New York's Neue Galerie, but luckily Vienna has so many Klimts that a masterpiece or two more or less can't change the impact of his life and art on the city.

Klimt was born and died in Vienna (1862-1918). His birthplace, a modest house at 247 Linzerstrasse in the 14th district, was destroyed in 1967, but I visited his grave in the Hietzinger Cemetery, near the Schonbrunn Palace, marked by a simple art-nouveau headstone where admirers still leave flowers.

I walked the atmospheric streets of old Vienna -- Blutgasse, Schonlaterngasse, Herrengasse -- that Klimt would have known (and that were used in the recent filming of an upcoming movie about Klimt, starting John Malkovich). Vienna's famous café culture came of age in Klimt's generation and is still booming, as are some of the cafés he frequented, such as the cavernous Café Central (Herrengasse 14). But most evocative of all is Klimt's art, which once both shocked and inspired fin-de-siècle Vienna.

His career began traditionally enough in the 1880s with a series of history paintings for the new Burgtheatre on the Ringstrasse where today visitors can climb the gala staircase below Klimt's scene of London's Globe theatre that includes a rare Klimt self-portrait: he appears as an Elizabethan audience member á la Blackadder -- goatee, ruff and all.
But by his next commission -- a series of female allegories representing various eras of art history for the nearby Museum of Art History -- Klimt was beginning to produce the kind of work he is best known for. Standing again on an entrance staircase, I wasn't the only museum-goer making themselves dizzy looking up to the ceiling to find Klimt's images, including a sinuous Cleopatra, a clear precursor to the femmes fatales to come.

And arrive they did, heralding in the advent of a new "youthful style," jugendstil, which rejected bourgeois conservatism in favour of something decidedly modern. The ultimate expression of this radical movement is what the Viennese have nicknamed the "golden cabbage," the Secession building, topped by an orb of gilded leaves. And inside, perhaps no femmes are quite so fatales as those in Klimt's Beethoven Frieze (1902). A pictorial interpretation of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, its writhing naked women and monsters shocked contemporaries who called it "obscene."

But others called it genius and Klimt and his Secessionist friends no doubt had many a debate on the divergent opinions at the nearby elegantly minimalist Café Museum designed by Adolf Loos. Today, the café attracts more tourists than artists, but coffee drinkers can still sit on Loos's red bentwood Thonet chairs -- reproductions of course, which now sell for a mere $850 each at the Thonet boutique. The originals are in the fabulously designed Museum of Applied Arts, along with Klimt's decorative masterpiece, The Stoclet Frieze (1905-12).

Almost every museum seems to have something of Klimt, most often images of his favourite subject: women.
The Vienna Museum has Klimt's portrait of his long-time companion, Emilie Floge (1902), immortalized in a sea of violet-blue design. Despite its recent losses, the palatial Belvedere Gallery still has the biggest collection of Klimt paintings in the world, from his exquisite landscapes to portraits of society women, whom he notoriously loved to seduce. They would visit him in his studio decorated with Josef Hoffman's Wiener Werkstatte furnishings in the 7th district (Josefstaterstrasse 21), today one of Vienna's trendiest neighbourhoods. While a modern apartment building now occupies the studios' address, the building opens into a back garden where Klimt would have once entertained friends, clients and lovers.

Despite the abundance of Klimts displayed, most Belvedere visitors make a beeline for his legendary The Kiss (1907-08). Despite its ubiquitous presence on university dorm walls and chocolate boxes, in real life it is startling, vibrant, erotic and just a bit frightening. No image better embodies fin-de-siècle Vienna: an entwined couple kneeling precariously at the edge of a glittering abyss; the surface is dazzlingly and modern, but just beneath lurks a sense of anxiety and impending doom.
For all of Klimt's controversies and triumphs, I was surprised to find his home unexpectedly ordinary. It is in an unremarkable apartment building on Westbahnstrasse 36 in Vienna's 7th district, where the radical artist and prolific seducer (14 illegitimate children came forth at his death) lived for most of his adult life with his mother. It is perhaps not coincidental that Klimt was a contemporary of another of Vienna's greats, Sigmund Freud.

Pack your bags
GETTING THERE
Austrian Airlines (http://www.aua.com) and Air Canada (ww.aircanada.com) fly directly to Vienna from Toronto during the summer and year-round via London and Frankfurt.

KLIMT IN VIENNA
Belvedere Gallery:
http://www.belvedere.at.
Burgtheater: http://www.burgtheater.at.
Museum of Art History (Kunsthistorisches Museum): http://www.khm.at.
Secession building: secession.at.
Café Museum: cafe-museum.at.
Thonet boutique:
http://www.thonet-vienna.at.
Museum of Applied Arts:
http://www.mak.at.
Vienna Museum: wienmuseum.at.

KLIMT IN NEW YORK
Neue Galerie, Museum for German and Austrian Art: 1048 Fifth Ave., New York; 212-628-6200; http://www.neuegalerie.org. Five of Gustav Klimt's masterpieces are on display until Sept. 18, including the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, which was recently purchased by billionaire Ronald S. Lauder for the Galerie. All five works were part of the Vienna Belvedere Gallery collection for decades, until this February, when, after a long court case, all were returned to Maria Altmann, 90, the Los Angeles-based niece of Bloch-Bauer, whose family had owned the paintings until fleeing Austria in 1938.

MORE INFORMATION
Vienna Tourism: www.wien.info.

RECOMMENTED READING
Klimt: Modernism in the Making, by C. B. Bailey (Abrams, 2001); Gustav Klimt, Painter of Women, by S. Partsch, (Prestel, 2006).