The premiere date was getting closer and the wall that was supposed to show the star work of the exhibition was in danger of remaining empty. The curatorial teams of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Belvedere in Vienna had been working for seven years on a reinterpretation of the figure of Gustav Klimt, receiving loans from Rodin, Matisse and Cézanne to juxtapose them with the artist’s capital works Austrian but Missing Water Snakes II , Klimt’s most expensive painting. The millionaire costs of the insurance far exceeded the legally stipulated state liability limit of 120 million euros. An agreement was reached at the last minute: the owner (anonymous) would pay the six-figure insurance premium and in return the Belvedere would restore the canvas.
The work has a turbulent history: it was stolen by the Nazis from the Jewish textile entrepreneur Jenny Steiner, a supporter of Klimt and the secessionist movement. When it was due to be auctioned off in 1940, the Reich Governor in Vienna, Baldur von Schirach, removed it from the lot and presented it on a tray to Nazi filmmaker Gustav Ucicky, Klimt’s illegitimate son, who hung it in his dining room. In 2013, the Ucicky and Steiner estates signed a restitution agreement, splitting equally the $112 million from their sale. Then followed the speculation typical of the current art market with another almost immediate private sale, exceeding $180 million, to a Russian oligarch, who in turn resold it for a similar amount. Klimt painted it between 1904 and 1907 and in all that time it was hardly shown to the public. In Austria she was last seen in 1964.
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In mid-January, he stepped through the doors of the Belvedere Restoration Workshop, a high-ceilinged studio in the castle’s old stables, among three-meter-tall jungle monsters and an exuberant smell of varnish and thinner. In just two weeks, restoration manager Stefanie Jahn carried out the damage inspection with a team of eight experts and restored slight cracks, cracks of less than two millimeters. “The canvas is in enviable condition,” says Jahn, speaking like an entomologist about the priceless finishing touches on every letter, every signature, every Klimt painting.
Some of the objects in the exhibition “Klimt. Inspired by Van Gogh, Rodin, Matisse…” in the Belverde Museum in Vienna.Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna
Considering the screen has survived an empire collapse, two world wars, a civil war, Aryanization and Nazi looting, that’s good news. With the world’s largest collection of Klimt’s works, including “The Kiss”, the owner has secured valuable know-how from the museum’s conservation department.
The restorer personally designed the Cyclops X-ray machine, which x-rays boards with two-meter rails and has its own space in the workshop. Scanning revealed Klimt’s sketches on the canvas; his changes in the composition of nymphs, water snakes, and golden threads of vines, which some art historians interpret as depicting lesbian eroticism. Klimt painted with precious metals, fine gold, silver and platinum sheets. “The brown fish seen here,” says Jahn, comparing a reproduction of the painting with microscopic photographs, “were originally silver-colored, they have gone through the oxidation process. That cannot be corrected.” And almost unintentionally he adds to the exhibition’s argument: “He experimented with techniques and materials shared by other international artists of his time.”
Klimt. Inspired by Van Gogh, Rodin, Matisse… it was first shown in Amsterdam in the autumn, with a different title but with the neon lights already in Water Snakes II, and is now on display at the Belvedere until May 29th, to mark its 300th anniversary To celebrate existence as an art space. There are differences: in Vienna, the main painting is exhibited alongside Water Snakes I (which was not moved to Amsterdam for conservation reasons), and both are juxtaposed with works by artist Macdonald Mackintosh, who is the only woman to appear in the exhibition, along with thirty international artists .
In total, it gathers more than 90 pieces to dismantle the myth of the lonely genius who created in a blue robe in a garden surrounded by nude muses (including model Maria Učická) and brilliantly present his catalog of influences. Curator Markus Fellinger says, “Our investigation uncovers a very different Klimt than usual. Through a series of meaningful comparisons, we illustrate how he appropriated the artistic achievements of his time.” Klimt was a sponge. When he co-founded the Secession, an association, in 1897 transgressive artist, he not only broke with the arbitrary blindness of academic painting, but also attracted the avant-garde like a magnet.Vienna, which they had not known until then, became a gravitational center of modernism.It was the Secession that first opened in 1903 Van Gogh paintings in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in an exhibition attended by 16,000 people, and with him Paul Cézanne, Pierre Bonnard, Toulouse-Lautrec, authors who had never been quoted in the local press.
The painting “Judith” that Klimt painted in 1901. Belvedere Museum
Everyone is in the Belvedere today, on a tour that represents a brilliant comparison of well-known companies. It is surprising to see the similarities between Klimt’s landscapes and Van Gogh’s; between Klimt’s golden age with his Judith in the front row and the Symbolists Fernand Khnopff and Franz von Stuck; between Klimt’s drawings of female nudes and Rodin’s sculptures; between Klimt and the subversion of poster art by Pierre Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec; between Klimt and Matisse, Monet, Manet, Alma-Tadema…
In the last room is the painting “Summer Night on the Beach” by Edvard Munch, which was also exhibited by the Secession in 1904. And next to it “The Bride”, the imposing work that Klimt left unfinished on his easel in 1918 when he died of pneumonia at the age of 55 during the flu epidemic.
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