Gustav Klimt, Borrower of Ideas

Gustav Klimt was not as original a painter as you might think. For the proof, head to Golden Boy Gustav Klimt at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

It's a terrible title, but a really engrossing and eye-opening exhibition, showing you exactly how much Klimt's work was influenced not just by some of the other big names in late 19th- and early 20th-century art such as Vincent van Gogh, Auguste Rodin and Edvard Munch, but also by painters you tend not to mention in the same breath: Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Franz von Stuck and, er, Jan Toorop. 

Jan Toorop? Yes, if you're looking for the inspiration for Klimt's dreamy, sensual Water Serpents, with their flowing hair and accompaniments of golden stars, flowers and fish, look no further than along the wall, where The Dutchman's The Three Brides, created a decade earlier, hangs. 

Toorop's Symbolist drawing is by no stretch of the imagination as seductive or memorable an image as Klimt's painting, but you only have to take one glance at the swirling hair of the nymphs that fill Toorop's work to see where the Austrian got his idea. 

Klimt didn't travel outside Austria much, but the Secession movement that he helped set up in Vienna at the end of the 19th century showed a lot of ground-breaking contemporary art from abroad in its exhibitions, and he certainly soaked up and reworked what he saw. And turned it into something magical all his own. There are more Toorop-like nudes in the Beethoven Frieze Klimt created for the Secession building, a reproduction of which is on show in Amsterdam.

We last went to see a Klimt show at the Leopold Museum in Vienna in 2018, and frankly, it wasn't that impressive. This exhibition, by contrast, gives very little detail of Klimt's life story but provides a far better opportunity to plunge deep into the art he created.   

If you're looking for a source for the femme fatale that is Klimt's Judith, you'll find it in Stuck's Sin, from the National Museum in Poznan, hanging just alongside. It really is remarkable, and it makes you see Klimt in a whole new light. (We'd like to show you more of these pictures directly, but the Van Gogh Museum has provided only a limited selection, and you're not supposed to take photos in the exhibition.... though quite a few visitors weren't complying with that rule, and the security people seemed not bothered.) 

There are some striking pairings of large portraits hung on one wall that are revelatory. You marvel at how much of John Singer Sargent's Study of Mme Gautreau from 1884 was taken over for Klimt's Portrait of a Woman painted a decade later: the black dress, the pose, the positioning of the face and hands. And, as we saw at the Whistler exhibition at the Royal Academy earlier this year, Klimt's Portrait of Hermine Gallia is an homage to Whistler's Woman in White.  

Here too are paintings that you'd possibly never place as Klimts: an Impressionist Girl in the Foliage and and a Fernand Khnopff-like Lady en Face, staring straight out at you. Very different paintings, both done in about 1898. 

There's work in this show you're quite likely never to have seen in the flesh before: What to make of Life is a Struggle (The Golden Knight), on loan from Japan? It's a Pre-Raphaelite sort of subject, with the flowers on the ground seeming to come from the early Northern Renaissance, but the execution is all Klimtian. Spot the snake slithering into the frame at bottom left. 

Another work that normally hangs far away in a Japanese gallery can be seen towards the end of the show -- a latish Portrait of Eugenia Primavesi, wearing an intensely vibrant dress. 

On the upper floor of the museum's exhibition space, the focus shifts mainly to landscapes.

Klimt's trademark square landscapes are often gorgeous, and just like his portraits, they clearly reveal his borrowings from other artists. The trees lining the Avenue to Schloss Kammer on the Attersee lake with their thick paint and strong blue outlines might have come straight from van Gogh. 

The Austrian saw van Gogh's work, including this one, The Pink Orchard, at the Impressionist exhibition in Vienna in 1903.

It's also instructive to compare Klimt's Italian Garden Landscape with van Gogh's view of Daubigny's Garden hanging alongside; you can again see how Klimt has taken on the structure and decorative scheme and made it his own.

Trees, flowers.... and water. Khnopff's Still Water has an eerie pool almost filling the frame, reflecting the trees and foliage. There's a very similar effect in Klimt's A Morning by the Pond. Both have a slightly unreal, other-worldly air, as if time has stood still. 

But in fashion and in art, time was moving on rapidly as the 19th century turned to the 20th. The show bows out with some more marvellous portraits of women. Even as war raged across Europe, Klimt was producing incredibly colourful work. 

This picture of Johanna Staude, with her fashionable short haircut and modish blouse made of fabric from the Wiener Werkstätte, finds her looking at you head-on. In a way, it's a mirror image of Henri Matisse's The Girl with Green Eyes;  the orange from Matisse's girl's dress becomes the background in Klimt's painting, and the blue in the Klimt blouse picks up the themes of the Matisse background.

Works by Matisse and others in the Fauvist movement were shown in Vienna in 1909 for the first time in an exhibition organised by Klimt. One last painting: Klimt's first using the Fauvists' bold style and vivid hues. 

It's Adele Bloch-Bauer; you might know her better from an earlier portrait as The Woman in Gold. There's not actually quite as much gold in this show as you might expect, but we give it a gold medal. 

Practicalities

Golden Boy Gustav Klimt runs at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam until January 8. The gallery is generally open daily from 0900 to 1700, with longer hours around Christmas and New Year; see the museum website. Tickets for the museum cost 20 euros full-price (no extra charge for the exhibition) and have to be booked online with a timeslot here. Book early; they can sell out. 

We generally find at the Van Gogh Museum that the temporary exhibitions aren't as crowded as you might fear, but it's best to go early in the day or later in the afternoon. Don't leave it too late, though, as you'll need 90 minutes to take in this show fully. The upstairs section, with the landscapes, is less busy. 

The Van Gogh is situated in the museum quarter in the south-west of the city centre, not far from the Rijksmuseum. It's easily accessible by tram or via a direct bus from Schiphol airport. 9292.nl is an excellent site that gives you public-transport connections across the Netherlands.

The show moves on to the Belvedere in Vienna (where The Kiss is the star of the permanent collection) from February 3 to May 29. 

While you're in the Van Gogh Museum 

You have the chance to explore the world's largest Van Gogh collection, with more than 200 paintings including The Potato Eaters, Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat and The Bedroom. Be warned, though, that the museum seems to be on the bucket list of every visitor to Amsterdam, some of whom may be less interested in appreciating the art than in ticking it off their schedule alongside the Rijksmuseum and the Anne Frank House and in buying a souvenir.

Images

Gustav Klimt, Water Serpents II, 1904 (reworked 1906-07), Private collection, courtesy of HomeArt
Gustav Klimt, Judith, 1901, Belvedere, Vienna. © Belvedere, Vienna

Gustav Klimt, Life is a Struggle (The Golden Knight), 1903, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya

Gustav Klimt, Avenue to Schloss Kammer, 1912, Belvedere, Vienna
Vincent van Gogh, The Pink Orchard, 1888, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Gustav Klimt, Johanna Staude, 1917–18, Belvedere, Vienna
Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer II, 1912, Private collection, courtesy of HomeArt