Klimt in Vienna: Skip the Show and Head for the Kiss

There are some outstanding exhibitions on in Vienna at the moment (Bruegel and Schiele, to name but two). Unfortunately, Gustav Klimt: Artist of the Century at the Leopold Museum isn't up to the same standard. For a stunning Klimt experience, far better to head to the Belvedere, where you can see not just The Kiss, but a lot of other great paintings too.

The Leopold is marking the 100th anniversary of the deaths of both Klimt and Schiele this year, but unlike the Schiele show in the basement, the Klimt retrospective is a bit muddled and not very well laid-out. If, like us, you know a bit but not a lot about Klimt, you'll find it somewhat confusing and irritating. And much of the really good stuff has stayed in the Belvedere, which has the biggest collection of Klimt works in oil.

In the first room, the curators give you a detailed biography of the artist, a man who loved a lot of women and fathered quite a lot of children. It's a bit of a shock to learn that Consuela Huber, with whom Klimt had three, only died in 1978.

This section is supposed to be devoted to the period when Klimt was part of the artistic establishment, working in an uncontroversial history-painting style on prestigious public commissions. But the works that are actually hung here are a mish-mash, with a very detailed and precise 1879 Head of a Man from the Front right next to a hatched Bust Portrait of a Young Lady from 20 years later, well after the founding of the Secession movement.

The highlight in this first room is Klimt's Portrait of a Woman from around 1893, which is actually part of the Belvedere collection. The woman is Marie Breunig, the wife of a Viennese baker. And obviously, not just one with a little corner shop. It's painted with a realism that, at first glance, gives little hint as to what is to come from Klimt. But then there is something of a luscious opulence about it, isn't there? The gorgeous black and that wall hanging....

Here's how it evolves just round the corner in the next room, with Friends I (Sisters) from 1907. 

But we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves here, because we're next told how Klimt became the founding president of the Secession movement in 1897, and how the first version of his poster advertising the breakaway artists' inaugural exhibition, showing a naked Theseus battling the Minotaur, had to be censored with the addition of a strategically placed tree. The before and after versions are both on show.

The following section brings us to the notorious Faculty Paintings for the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna. Klimt got the commission for these in 1894, but didn't start them till 1900 and only finished them in 1907. They were destroyed at the end of World War II and are mocked up here largely from black-and-white photographs.

Klimt's representations of Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence came under attack for their nudity and sheer weirdness, and were of course rejected. It was his last public commission. If you're trying to decipher these mysterious images, you need to rely on a description by a contemporary critic in minuscule print tucked away at the side of the room, so you keep stepping back and forth trying to work out what's what.

Relief comes in the form of a fine range of landscape paintings in Klimt's characteristic and odd square format. It's notable how much water they contain. On Lake Attersee hardly has anything else, and is almost abstract.

We get a glimpse into Klimt's studio, and a look at his muse, Emilie Flöge, but the main focuses of the final section of the exhibition are The Bride, left unfinished on his easel at the time of his death, and his unsettling late painting Death and Life. A grinning death figure clad in a garment of blue covered with black crosses raises a cudgel at the swirl of bodies on the right, representing all the ages of Man.

Some highlights, then, but we felt strangely unsatisfied by this show and the next morning dropped into the Belvedere to look at the permanent collection there. What is there to see? Some fantastic portraits -- Fritza Riedler and Sonja Knips, a vision in pink -- and then there's Judith, the ultimate femme fatale, seductress and decapitator of the Assyrian general Holofernes. A Bible story that's often been rendered in paint, but in Klimt's version the head of Holofernes appears an afterthought, almost cropped out of the image. 

The Belvedere also has some of Klimt's beautiful floral works, with this Sunflower among the outstanding examples.

But it's The Kiss that people go for. Austria's most famous painting by Austria's most famous artist, and one of the most recognisable images in art. It is stunning. You can follow the crowd and use your mobile phone to take a selfie (ideally with grinning partner) in front of it and then whizz on to your next photo-opportunity, or you can give yourself a few minutes to drink in the remarkable vision of Gustav Klimt.

"You are really rather arrogant,'' a woman told Klimt when he was 28, "but of course you have every right to be."

Practicalities

Gustav Klimt: Artist of the Century is on at Vienna's Leopold Museum until November 4 and is open Wednesday to Monday from 1000 to 1800, with late opening on Thursdays to 2100. Full-price admission to all the exhibitions at the Leopold is 13 euros, and you can book tickets online here. The Leopold is in Vienna's Museum Quarter, just outside the Ringstrasse boulevard that encircles the city centre and a couple of minutes walk from the old masters in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Museumsquartier and Volkstheater are the nearest Underground stations, and numerous trams run nearby.

The permanent Klimt collection is in the Upper Belvedere on Prinz-Eugen-Strasse to the south of the city centre. It's open daily 0900 to 1800, with lates on Fridays to 2100. Full-price tickets for the Upper Belvedere are 15 euros, or a combined ticket with the Lower Belvedere, where a new Egon Schiele exhibition starts October 19, is 22 euros. Online tickets, which aren't bound to any particular day, are available here. Rennweg and Quartier Belvedere stations are close on the S-Bahn suburban rail network, and trams and buses run nearby.

Images

Gustav Klimt, Portrait of a Woman, c. 1893, Belvedere, Vienna, permanent loan from private collection. Photo: Belvedere, Vienna/Johannes Stoll
Gustav Klimt, Friends I (Sisters), 1907, Klimt Foundation, Vienna. Photo: Klimt Foundation, Vienna
Gustav Klimt, On Lake Attersee, 1900, Leopold Museum, Vienna. Photo: Leopold Museum, Vienna/Manfred Thumberger
Gustav Klimt, Death and Life, 1910/11, reworked 1915/16, Leopold Museum, Vienna. Photo: Leopold Museum, Vienna/Manfred Thumberger
Gustav Klimt, Judith, 1901, Belvedere, Vienna. © Belvedere, Vienna
Gustav Klimt, Sunflower, 1907, Belvedere, Vienna. © Belvedere, Vienna
Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1908/1909, Belvedere, Vienna. © Belvedere, Vienna