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Among the most fascinating inclusions are 31 of the 50 small phototype photographs from the “Das Werk von Gustav Klimt” portfolio, divided among the show’s three galleries. They float in the background, forming a quiet review of Klimt’s painting career. Here you will find more of his transitional landscapes from the late 1890s and recurring compositional devices. One is the isolation of a vertical group of figures or flowers in the center of some paintings, whether landscapes like “The Sunflower” or one of his most famous figurative works, “The Kiss.” Phototypes of the two hang side by side in the exhibition’s final gallery.
Some of Klimt’s paintings exist today only in phototype reproductions. Several originals were destroyed in World War II; others were reworked. For example, Klimt’s portrait of Emilie Flöge from 1902-03, seen here in phototype, was one of the first decorative portraits of him. Some time after it was photographed for the portfolio, Klimt reworked it, updating it with the most recent ones. He intensified the blue, divided his motifs into finer, mosaic-like patterns, and added the shine of silver.
As you progress through this program, the dots connect visually and historically. The installation makes it unusually clear that Hoffmann’s famous brooches are small gardens with flowers and trees that converse with Klimt’s landscapes, which, like them, are also square, emphasizing their modernity.
You may find another such connection when you reach the show’s third and final gallery, where five of the six late landscapes almost seem to fill the entire space with their dense foliage. Some of the trunks in these images have sinuous trunks of brown, spotted green, black, and gray.
Between their curves and slightly hallucinatory patterns, they evoke some of Klimt’s portraits and his fluid garments. As if to bear witness to this unexpected connection, Klimt’s (1917-1918) unfinished “Portrait of Ria Munk III” hangs on an adjacent wall, a nearly life-size image of a dark-haired woman in a loose, floral tunic. It is roughly drawn in pencil. Behind her bands of flowers, real or stylized or transformed into decorative objects, a true outline of the Secession-Werkstätte’s achievement.
I doubt there have been many Klimt exhibitions like this bracing, serendipitous study of his life and times, with unusually effective use of extreme context. When you arrive at the last gallery to savor the admittedly small group of late landscapes, you may have a different idea of how many paintings it takes to hold an exhibition of this size and still make sense. I did.