The Origins of a Legend Palazzo Reale, Milan from 12 March to 13 July 2014

by Professor Francesco Carelli University of Milan and Rome

The exhibition Klimt: The Origins of A Legend, jointly arranged with the Belvedere Museum in Vienna (Österreichische Galerie Belvedere) and promoted by the City Council of Milan-Cultura, has been organized and produced by the Palazzo Reale, 24 ORE Cultura – Gruppo 24 ORE, and the Arthemisia Group.

Twenty oil paintings by Gustav Klimt on display at the Palazzo Reale from 12 March to 13 July 2013: an extraordinary number, considering that only 100 paintings and frescoes by the artist are known to us today, and that, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Klimt’s birth, the Belvedere Museum exhibited a total of forty oil paintings in its blockbuster 2012 show that traced the brilliant Austrian artist’s career, from his early training and development to his maturity.

The original reconstruction of the Beethoven Frieze – displayed in Vienna in 1902 in the Secession Building built in 1897 – occupies an entire room of the Palazzo Reale, “immersing” visitors in this total work of art – a concept that was the highest aspiration of the artists that made up the Vienna Secession – to the strains of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Indeed, the exhibition is so arranged as to firmly place themes and artworks in the context of total art, the movement’s hallmark.

The exhibition also takes a thorough look at Klimt’s relationship with his family and his sentimental attachments, examining the start of his career at Vienna’s School of Applied Arts as well as his love of theatre and music. A number of works come from other leading museums; this is the case for masterpieces such as Adam and Eve, Salome, Sunflower and Water in Motion.
A female ghost wanders about in European culture between the late 19th and the early 20th centuries: the “ woman who cuts off heads “ , the fatal seductress who brings men to the ruin, and even to their death, and who takes on the biblical semblances of Salome or Judith. Celebrated by Wilde, Moreau and Bearsdley, set to music by Strauss, this attractive and fatal figure congested the erotic imaginary of poets and artists as though they were obsessed. Klimt devoted two memorable works to this theme in 1901 and in 1909, respectively, who marked the beginning and the end of his “ golden period “.
In this case he painted a modern , anti-classical, slender and nervous beauty , who emerges from a mosaic made of fabrics.
Special attention is paid to Klimt’s youthful output, his training at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna and his first commissions to decorate the monumental buildings that had sprung up along the Ring, following in the footsteps of Hans Makart. This initial phase would prove decisive in steering the artist towards an embrace of modernity, precisely because, as Agnes Husslein-Arco, the director of the Belvedere, explains in the catalogue: “It is a little-known fact that the Künstler-Compagnie, the group of artists founded in 1881 by Gustav Klimt, Franz Matsch (Klimt’s classmate at the School of Applied Arts at the Austrian Museum for Art and Industry), and Klimt’s younger brother Ernst, was active for nearly twelve years and owed much of its reputation to its painted decorations of public buildings, particularly theatres. These commissions can be thanked for the success of this group of painters, especially Gustav Klimt, on Vienna’s art scene.”
Klimt: The Origins of A Legend takes visitors on a journey of discovery, to explore the career of an artist who has become a legend by means of several of the Austrian artist’s best-known masterpieces, which still enchant viewers today. Works on display include: Adam and Eve, The Family, Sunflower, Will O’ the Wisp, Water in Motion, and Salome, not to mention his evocative landscapes After the Rain and Cows in Stall, as well as his superb portraits of women.
The first part of the exhibition places the artist in the context of his family; alongside works by his brothers Ernst and Georg, Klimt’s youthful portraits of his own family members are on display, as well as original photographs from the artist’s bequest.
The second part of the show is devoted to the Klimt brothers’ apprenticeship at the Vienna School of Arts & Crafts, when they co-founded, together with Franz Matsch, the so-called Künstler-Compagnie (Artists’ Company). The paintings featured here illustrate Klimt’s training as a history painter and the influence of Hans Makart’s art on his own development. The entire season of the Künstler-Compagnie is covered, up to the death of Ernst Klimt in 1891. Thanks mainly to large sketches of the brothers’ decorative paintings for theatres and museums, the three artists clearly emerge as Hans Makart’s heirs, while departing from his neo-Baroque style.
Klimt’s creative crisis after the Künstler-Compagnie disbanded is placed in the broader framework of the crisis in Viennese art as a whole, which would lead to the founding of the Secession. A selection of works from its earliest phase attests to Klimt’s definitive rejection of the historical tradition and his consequent embrace of the international avant-garde.
In the paintings for the University, Klimt describes a sorrowful humanity in the cosmic void. Klimt was the visual interpreter of the crisis of positivism and rationalism, and, instead of celebrating the salvific power of science and its progress, he declared that philosophy does not resolve the enigma of human fate, that medicine does not defeat death and disease, and that the law legitimizes tyranny and revenge.
Two rooms are devoted to portraits and landscapes, genres that interested Klimt from the very founding of the Secession. Three of his finest portraits of women – Lady by the Fireplace and the two Portraits of a Lady – which Klimt painted between 1894 and 1898, provide an in-depth understanding of his forays into the first genre and also illustrate the artist’s special relationship with the female sex. Several recently-discovered love letters that Klimt addressed to Emilie Flöge are also on display, furnishing an intimate glimpse of the artist’s romantic attachments.
The room devoted to landscapes not only features two significant works by Klimt himself – After The Rain and Cows in Stall – it also provides an overview of Austrian landscapes at that time, from the earliest, late-19th-century impressionistic works to the Secession paintings by Carl Moll and Koloman Moser.
Lastly, two more paintings, Will O’ The Wisp and The Family, are emblematic of Klimt’s symbolistic phase, the section that rounds out the exhibition.