The Brooklyn Rail

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) is best known in the United States for his portraits. A few years ago Ronald S. Lauder, founder of the Neue Galerie, made news by paying an astonishing price for a Klimt portrait. And so the praiseworthy goal of this exhibition is to introduce his landscape paintings, which were an important part of his oeuvre. And because the artist is generally much less well known (at least in this country) than his French peers, the Neue Galerie provides much usable information about their context, including an elaborate timeline, numerous photographs and works on paper. By the time you arrive at the final gallery, you are well primed to look at his four medium-sized landscape paintings. Park at Kammer Castle (1909) shows the luxuriant trees, shrubbery, and reflections in the pond, in Klimt’s quasi-pointillist technique. Pear Tree (Pear Trees) (1903, later reworked) is closer up to its subject, showing verdant trees with leaves constructed from vibrating spots of light yellowish green, darker green, and violet. And Forester’s House in Weissenbach II (Garden) (1914) depicts the vines growing on the house, with bright small yellow and large white flowers in the foreground.

During the summer, Klimt regularly moved to the countryside with friends and painted outdoors. As in France, where Monet and Pissarro summered in Normandy, thanks to newly constructed train lines, rural destinations became easily accessible in Austria as well. Vienna certainly was an important center for modernist music (e.g., Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern), new explorations of cultural history (e.g., Freud, Loos) and theories of philosophy and art history (e.g., Wittgenstein, Riegl, Gombrich). But its place in painting’s history is less obvious. Klimt’s clinically strange allegory, Fable (1883), which includes a fox, stork, lion, mice and frogs, and allusions to Aesop’s Fables, shows how far his sensibility was from that of the avant-garde French art world. The artistic style of this painting resembles that of contemporary academic painting. And his splendid later landscapes, quite different from his earlier works, have little to do with Impressionism or Post-Impressionism. In short, this show is not easy to understand.

The Neue Galerie, a jewel box of a museum, still feels like the luxurious private mansion it originally was until turned into this museum. No wonder, then, that Klimt’s art has been disparaged as mere kitsch. The setting is more like one of the grand Upper East Side commercial galleries than that of the other Manhattan art museums. (One distinguished reviewer of this exhibition speaks of Klimt’s “Hunger to Please.”) And the book-length catalogue doesn’t say much about how to place his art historically. The traditional American modernist canon focused on French precedents for New York’s Abstract Expressionism. Monet led to Picasso and Matisse led to Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman: that story is very familiar. By contrast, the best known Austrian modernists, Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, all marvelous painters, don’t inaugurate a comparable tradition. And while Impressionism was shown in Klimt’s Vienna, he seemed to have worked in a parallel Austrian universe. His pointillism owes more to the sixth-century Christian mosaics at Ravenna than to Georges Seurat. You need only walk south to the Met to see Seurat’s The Forest at Pontaubert (1881) to recognize how different Klimt’s deployment of this technique in landscape painting was. Part of what’s distinctive in these pictures is the palette, which in its strong vibrating colors anticipates the effect of Joan Mitchell’s abstractions more than it emulates Claude Monet’s landscapes. And it’s the distinctive way that Klimt juxtaposes the all-over formless depictions of vegetation with the depictions of buildings in his landscapes. Now, then, perhaps it is time to give up our traditional modernist canon to make way for these strange, passionately attractive pictures.