Gustav Klimt: Landscapes

by Donald Goddard

This is one of four exhibitions at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (the others are devoted to the architects Otto Wagner and Josef Hoffmann and the painter Bernardo Bellotto) that are part of The Vienna Project at eleven institutions in eastern Massachusetts (five for art, three each for music and theater) during the summer and into the fall of 2002.

Klimt was not demur about his position. In an interview for the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung in 1905 (quoted in the catalogue), he said, "I want to liberate myself. I want to break away from all these unpleasant, ridiculous aspects which restrict my work. I refuse all official support, I will do without everything. . . . The main thing is, I want to be in the front position, acting against the way in which the Austrian state, the Ministry of Education, deals with artistic matters. It grasps every opportunity for attacking genuine art and genuine artists. It supports only the weak, only the false. . . ."

At this point, the deeply hurt and disappointed Klimt is generally depicted as having withdrawn from public battles, from the great aesthetic issues of the day, into a world of abstraction and distanced emotion, a private world of elite patrons and summers in the country. And indeed, one would scarcely know from Klimt's art or the scant evidence of his personal life that the anti-Semitic Karl Lueger served at mayor of Vienna from 1895 to 1910 (a shining example for Adolph Hitler, who lived in the city from 1907 to 1913); that the sixtieth anniversary of Emperor Franz Joseph's reign was celebrated with overbearing pomp in 1908; that the First World War was fought throughout Europe during the last three-and-a-half years of Klimt's life.

Most importantly, his art opened up, not least because landscape painting became so important to him from 1898 on (the exhibition covers from 1898 to 1916). He moved toward a vision that was increasingly based on the light, openness, and patterns of nature rather than the formal, especially linear, complications of narrative and mythology. Farmhouse with Birch Trees (Young Birches) of 1900 was created with the understanding that those four almost imperceptibly present and slightly curved vertical tree trunks embraced and organized a space containing an infinite multitude of life and that the brushstrokes the artist used were synonymous with the organisms they represented in their shapes, gestures, and colors. The trunks are no longer pillars as in earlier work, but are now graceful, like women or the beautiful agonized men that Schiele later drew. None of this would be possible without Klimt's knowledge of Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism--the breakdown of matter--but it is quite different. Every stroke is something and part of a whole that Klimt once made differently. He seems to literally realize, visually, Arthur Schopenhauer's apprehension in The World as Will and Idea (1819 and 1844, as quoted by curator Stephen Koja in the catalogue) that: "it is an awkward situation for a thinking being to stand in a borderless space, without knowing whence and whither, being only one of countless other similar creatures, who push, drive, and torment, restlessly and rapidly develop, and pass away, in a time without beginning and end: with nothing persistent except matter and the recurrence of the same, differing organic forms, over certain paths and channels which just happen to exist." In a sense, it is not necessary to mythologize, to symbolize, to reach some deeper levels in the human and cosmic stories. It is there already, in nature and in art.

In many works throughout this period, the view is of a field or hedge of flowers, or of the leafy and flowered branches of trees pushing out to the edges of the canvas so that little of the sky appears. The point of vision is intense and uncompromising, forcing the viewer (artist) to hold this incredible abundance in his eye, his brain. In later paintings, from about 1908 on, architecture reenters the scene in views across the lake or in the woods from Klimt's various vacation studios. It is here that Klimt used opera glasses, telescope, and even telephoto camera lenses (Forest Slope in Unterach on the Attersee of 1916 may be based on a photo taken with one). Gradually, but not always, the multitude of brushstrokes become clustered in shapes with the outlines of flowers, branches, buildings, and even entire trees, as though to provide an answer to Schopenhauer's conundrum, to confront the phenomenon of natural chaos with the will to aesthetic control--something like discovering the structure of cells or atoms. Where outline had once been banished, it now reappears.

The landscapes had an enormous effect, I think, on all of Klimt's work, his portraits and mythological figures. His natural sensuality became even more pronounced in paintings like The Kiss, Danae (both of 1907-08) and Death and Life (1916), in which the surfaces are played out not only in curvilinear shapes but in patterns and mosaics of colorful facets that seem to derive both from his nature paintings and from the primal symbolisms that might be associated with them. The women in his portraits, from those of his "golden" period (1901-08) to the later more fluid ones, are figures of extraordinary beauty and sensuality within the context of art and nature. They cannot be separated from their attributes or from their settings, and yet somehow their embodiments of expression and personality are distinctive and irreducible, like Schopenhauer's "thinking being . . . in a borderless space."

Finally, Klimt's late landscapes are not really about "distancing," as Wagner and others have defined it. On the contrary, Klimt used the telescope to collapse the distance, to bring in more of the world. He was able to make what was out of reach part of his own experience, and ours--to go as far as an artist can go.

Donald Goddard © 2002