klimt -- 2/20/2026

20 Feb 2026

klimt -- 2/20/2026

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Today's selection -- from Gustav Klimt by Tobias G. Natter. Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) was an Austrian painter whose work has commanded some of the highest prices in the art market. His primary works involving the female figure were sometimes deemed pornographic while he was alive; now, some are deemed masterpieces. He was influenced by Japanese art, helped define the Art Nouveau, and was a founding member of the Vienna Secession movement. Famously, he helped organize--and exhibited at--the Kunstschau Wien 1908 (Vienna Art Show of 1908), which featured more than 170 artists, one of many events marking the 60th anniversary of the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph I:

“The ambitious 1908 exhibition Kunstschau was intended as a powerful return of Klimt and his close associates to the public stage and to the forefront of Viennese art with the reassertion of the Gesamtkremstwerk as the leading art form. In a sprawling complex designed by Josef Hoffmann with over fifty galleries as well as courtyards and gardens, the Kunstschau brought together Austrian painting and sculpture with the most distinguished manifestations of the decorative arts. The exhibition attempted to realize environments conducive to the group's and the Wiener Werkstatte’s expressed desire for a unified and coherent style penetrating all aspects of life (a 'Stilkunst'), overcoming the separation between the artist and consumer. The contemplation of an artwork was to be an act of creative consumption, as Klimt stated in a rare speech given the occasion of the opening of the Kunstschau: ‘And we interpret the term “artist” just as broadly as the term “work of art”. Not only those who create art are worthy of this name, all those who are capable of feeling and of valuing artistic creation. In our minds the “art world” is an ideal community of creators and connoisseurs.’

“However, in the Kunstschau exhibition, painting and the decorative arts remained largely separated, with displays devoted either to fine or to applied art. The latter took the form of a series of completely styled domestic and public environments devoted to a variety of functions in which paintings featured as decorative additions but not elemental building blocks. It was in the ambitious and sophisticated exhibition of works of art that painting, architecture and ornament came together most successfully, in particular in the large central gallery designed by Kolo Moser and devoted to Klimt. Klimt presented a number of recent and new paintings, including The Three Age of Women, 1905, the Portrait of Fritza Riedle, 1906, The Kiss, 1907/08, the rich golden Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, some allegorical compositions such as The Water Snakes I,1904-1907, and Danae,1907/08. The architecture and installation represent a high point of so-called Raumkuust ('arc of the interior'), as the important discipline of exhibition design was known at the time. Klimt's recent work was presented on white walls with a regular background grid of small squares in addition to elaborate geometric sopraporta ornaments evolving from the artist's stylized monogram. The walls themselves were framed by thin linear ornament in black and white, creating a solid architectural order around the ornamental sumptuousness of his disintegrating surfaces.

The Kiss by Gustav Klimt

“The practice of carefully centering single works on a wall or sparsely hanging groups had been introduced only a few years earlier in Secession exhibitions by the architect and painter Kolo Moser. Almost completely white and unstructured walls were also first introduced by Moser in his designs for the seventeenth and, in particular, eighteenth Secession exhibitions, both in 1903. The latter included the magnificent 'Klimt Collective' exhibition featuring forty-eight paintings and thirty drawings. For this presentation, Moser was praised for his ‘strict economy of the distribution [... ] if possible with only one picture on a wall and the few works in a room coordinated according to colour harmony. The environment is thus kept as still and discreet as possible.’ The restrained classicism of these installations created a supportive decorative background without competing with the works of arc, anchoring the paintings in space while powerfully enhancing the Fliichendekor (two-dimensional decor) of The Kiss, 1907/08, and recent portraits, including The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907. The opulence of Klimt's art of the period found sympathetic enhancement in the controlled architectonic order set against the ‘decorative-ornamental sensuality’ and the ‘protean element, the ornamental principle in itself’ of his linear ornament.

“The Kunstschau did not receive the same attention as earlier exhibitions, its decline in popular appeal being in direct relation to the broad acceptance of that of the achievements of the Secession and the Wiener Werksratte. The Gesamtkunstwerk might not have failed, but it now found its most successful manifestation in sophisticated decorative schemes and interior designs rather than in ambitious artistic visions. In this respect, the exhibition contained the germ, as Carl Schorske argued, for ‘an explosive reassertion of painting as the medium of instinctual truth’, which emerged between the first and second Kunstschau in the following year and coincided with the emergence of the Expressionists Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele. The Secession had forcefully broken with the past and rung in a new age for arc. The next generation followed in their footsteps but, at the same time, felt compelled to replace aesthetic refinement and the penetration of life by exquisite beauty with a more forceful and raw form of creative expression.”