Lot Essay
About a quarter of Gustav Klimt's painted oeuvre consists of landscapes. Around 54 are known to exist, and from 1900, landscapes entwined in theme, mood and execution with the portrait works on which he was working contemporaneously. In general they were painted en plein-air during the three months he spent nearly each summer with his companion Emilie Flöge (1874-1952) on the shore of the Attersee in the Salzkammergut district, east of Salzburg. Bauerngarten, together with three others (Novotny-Dobai nos. 145-148), was painted during one of the summer sojourns of 1905-1907.
Bauerngarten represents in its blazing colours and concentrated focus a hymn to the blossoming of nature in all its summer abundance. Johannes Dobai who features the picture on the cover of his book devoted to Klimt's landscapes, described Bauerngarten in the following terms: "In Flower Garden the basic motif is a kind of floral pyramid; the triangular shape - which tends to have a condensing effect - contains an abundance of flowers and leaves, all of varying size, colour, luminosity and characteristics; it contains a 'multiplicity in simplicity'. The positioning of these elements follows the 'rule' of uncultivated, untamed nature - accident and agglomeration. Just as the seeds are carried away at the whim of the wind, so the blossoms grow in distorted clusters, although occasionally there is as rigorous a geometry about them as there is about the square of the painting itself. Bottom right, for instance, there is a group comprising four flowers; three of them lie horizontally at equal distance from one another, while above the third flower on the right there floats a fourth of the same species. In other clusters there is a similar dialectical interplay between geometry and disorder. Now and again within the pyramid individual flowers appear, almost like surprise special effects, in this firework display of summer heat." (Gustav Klimt Landscapes, Boston, 1988, p. 19).
Klimt turned to landscape painting relatively late in his career. His first landscape pictures, dating from circa 1898-1899 (cf. Novotny-Dobai nos. 98-99, 106-107), find Klimt employing a vertical format and depicting landscape in a symbolist manner redolent of the work of the Belgian Symbolist, Fernand Khnopff. "Sombre, mysterious, with an indefinable air of allegory, they seemed to embody the essence of the master's early manner". (P. Vergo, Art in Vienna, 1898-1918, London, 1975, p. 79). From 1900 onwards Klimt's landscapes are, without exception, in a square format approximately 1 metre square. "The majority have an extremely high horizon line, or lack one altogether, so that their subjects, whether flower beds, woods or meadows, seem to unfurl before the eye from top to bottom of the canvas, more like tapestries or rugs than painting." (F. Whitford, Klimt, London, 1990, p. 184).
The early years of this century saw dramatic upheavals in the avantgarde art movement in Vienna. In 1897 Klimt had founded the Secession, following the example of the previously established Munich Secession, as an independent autonomous association of young artists who had felt stifled by the conservative bias of the old-fashioned, hierarchical Viennese Künstlerhaus. The Secession brought together painters and sculptors of all styles as well as designers, graphic artists, architects and typographers. It also had as a primary objective the aim of showing contemporary foreign art in Vienna. The Secession had a galvanising effect on Viennese cultural life and established a distinct "Viennese style" in Jugendstil. The close collaboration with designers and craftsmen such as Josef Hoffmann and Josef-Maria Ollbrich further inspired the development of ornamentation in Klimt's work which was to have an important effect on his treatment of lanscape. "In his works of the early 1900s, he experiments constantly with the decorative possibilities offered by the use of materials such as gold and silver, inlay and semi-precious stones; his pictures of this period were on several occasions criticised as not being paintings in the proper sense at all, but objects of applied art. This period of experimentation culminated in the Stoclet-Frieze of 1905-1911, the artist's most advanced use of a composite medium, and the magnificent golden paintings of the years 1907-8." (Vergo, op. cit., p. 38)
A conflict within the Secession itself arose between the "Stylists", led by Klimt, and the "Naturalists", led by Engelhart, which resulted in a split by Klimt's followers in 1905. This split marked the end of the heroic period of the Vienna Secession but unfortunately also meant that the Klimtgruppe had no public exhibition space for its work. However, in 1908, they were offered the lease of a site near the Lothringerstrasse where they built, to a prefabricated design by Hoffmann, an ambitious exhibition complex which was inaugurated with the Kunstschau of 1908. This was the most important single exhibition project in pre-war Vienna and provided a comprehensive round-up of Viennese avantgarde art. Klimt was given a room to himself in which were hung sixteen pictures, probably including Bauerngarten. As Klimt remarked in his opening address to the Kunstschau, "We have not been idle during these exhibitionless years, that on the contrary - perhaps because we have been free from the cares of arranging exhibitions - we have been working all the more industriously, inwardly, on the development of our ideas."
It was during these 'exhibitionless years' in 1905-07 that Bauerngarten was painted. The celebrated dress designer and fashion-house proprietor, Emilie Flöge, had become Klimt's lifelong companion. Although they did not live under the same roof in Vienna, between 1900-1916 they left the stifling heat of the Vienna summer to retreat together to the peace and quiet of the Salzkammergut countryside where Klimt could work in solitude without distraction. There, on the shore of the Attersee, Klimt lived for three months each summer in the company of Emilie Flöge, her mother and her two sisters. The present picture was painted in the garden of a local farmer called Mayr at Litzlberg.
In a letter to Mizzi Zimmerman of August 1903, Klimt described a typical day's work at Attersee: "Early in the morning, mostly about six, a little earlier or later - I get up - if the weather is good I go into the forest nearby - I'm painting a little beech wood there (in the sun) with a few conifers in between, that lasts until 8 o'clock, then we have breakfast, after that a swim in the lake, taken with due care - after that again a little painting, when the sun's shining a picture of the lake, when the weather's overcast a landscape from the window of my room - often I don't paint in the morning but instead study my Japanese books - outside in the open. So midday comes, after eating, a little nap or reading - until afternoon coffee - before or after coffee a second swim in the lake, not regularly but mostly. After coffee it's painting again - a large poplar at twilight with a storm coming on - now and again instead of this evening painting but that's rare - then dusk - dinner - then in good time to bed and again in good time up the next morning. Now and again in this division of the day there's a little rowing in order to get my muscles toned up." (Whitford, loc. cit., p. 180). So it was that Klimt's landscape paintings are always summer pictures. The joyous mood reflects his own contentment with his surroundings. It appears that he reserved working on his portrait pictures for the winter campaign in his Vienna studio.
However, Klimt's landscapes echo his portrait works in many ways. The similarity of technique and penchant for ornamentation found in his portraits is plainly evident in such a work as Bauerngarten, but even more striking is the manner in which Klimt's landscapes assume an anthropomorphic nature. In Bauerngarten the pyramidal arrangement of flowers closely resembles the format of the celebrated contemporaneous portrait of Fritza Riedler (Novotny-Dobai 143, Oesterreichische Galerie, Vienna). In the landscape Klimt seems to be consciously working in parallel with the portrait, imbuing the subject with a human quality despite the overall decorative effect. It is intriguing to note that Klimt's landscapes are almost always devoid of human presence and that his portraits are almost always of figures in enclosed, hermetic settings without allusions to landscape or nature. Frank Whitford observes, "It might be thought that nature provided Klimt with subjects more congenial to his temperament and better suited to his style than portraits: the individuality of his sitters ultimately resisted all his attempts to subjugate them to the tyranny of decoration. Nature is more amenable to such treatment; lakes, flower beds, forests and meadows more obviously provide the basis for elaborate stylisation and patternmaking than do human beings, no matter how extravagantly dressed." (op. cit., p. 177). The duality of treatment finds its climax in this "Golden Period" of Klimt with the mosaic patternmaking of Bauerngarten and the Bildnis Adele Bloch-Bauer I of 1907 (Novotny-Dobai 150, Oesterreichische Galerie, Vienna), both shown in the 1908 Kunstschau.
Nature has an important role in Klimt's art, not just from the fact that a quarter of his output consists of landscapes or because of the symbiotic relationship of his landscapes and his portrait pictures. C. M. Nebehay described him as "one of the most significant landscape painters of his time...He saw in landscape the means of entering a mood, a sort of creative stimulus like a "jewel", a "firework", he saw the landscape's structure and the unfolding of elemental biological life forces, but the secret of his art as a landscape painter lies in the manner in which these different ways of seeing are layered and interlaced...The landscape was for him a place of contemplation, source of joy but also of sorrow." (S. Partsch, Klimt, Life and Work, London, 1989, p. 288). Dobai writes that "the locus of Klimt's thematic material is the erotic, which branches into its sexual and biological aspects. The predilection toward the erotic can be noted both in figural compositions and in landscape...The early landscapes often show a swamp, or a glistening water surface; later they become close-ups of vegetation, transformed into a rich and sensuous surface. Paintings of gardens are frequent. The theme of the profusion was well-known in Vienna; but Klimt's constantly repeated ornamentalised leaves and flowers stress the unfree and predetermined aspect of the bioogical world...after 1900 [he] often made use of the pointilist technique, transformed into a pervasive luminous vibration. In other landscapes, a construction of parallel planes of foliage suggests the experience of isolation and alienation. This "manneristic distance" is heightened by the luxuriance of Klimt's colour. In effect, the panerotic quality of the figurative pictures, which caused a great deal of protest, including a parliamentary investigation, was consistently carried through in Klimt's landscapes." (Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, New York, 1965, pp. 23-24).
In the three climactic 1905-1907 garden paintings, exemplified by Bauerngarten, "Klimt is not chiefly interested in the faithful rendering of optical impressions of the transitory effects of light and air. His paintings are faithful to what he saw, yet at the same time they go beyond it. They use design and texture, pattern and colour, in order to make the transitory permanent, to arrest the fleeting, to transform and fix a world that is constantly changing and decaying into an immutable paradise." (Whitford, op. cit., p. 184).
The outstanding qualities of Klimt's landscape paintings were recognised at the time by the poet Peter Altenberg who termed the Klimt room at the 1908 Kunstschau, in which Bauerngarten was probably first exhibited, "the Gustav Klimt cathedral of modern art" and went on to write in his review, "Are you an upright, tender friend of nature? Then allow your eyes to feast on these pictures: country gardens, beech woods, roses, sunflowers, poppies flowering! The landscape is treated as the women are, elevated, exalted, romantic! This is right, this is sacred, visible even to the sceptics with their jaded eyes! Gustav Klimt, a mysterious blend of primeval peasant and historical Romantic, praise be to you."
Bauerngarten was probably not only exhibited at the 1908 Kunstschau but also at the 1909 Kunstschau the following year. Following this it was exhibited in Prague at the Deutsch-Böhmischer Künstlerbund in 1910. It was then purchased by the Narodni Galerie in Prague the same year (inventory number 04107).
Bauerngarten represents in its blazing colours and concentrated focus a hymn to the blossoming of nature in all its summer abundance. Johannes Dobai who features the picture on the cover of his book devoted to Klimt's landscapes, described Bauerngarten in the following terms: "In Flower Garden the basic motif is a kind of floral pyramid; the triangular shape - which tends to have a condensing effect - contains an abundance of flowers and leaves, all of varying size, colour, luminosity and characteristics; it contains a 'multiplicity in simplicity'. The positioning of these elements follows the 'rule' of uncultivated, untamed nature - accident and agglomeration. Just as the seeds are carried away at the whim of the wind, so the blossoms grow in distorted clusters, although occasionally there is as rigorous a geometry about them as there is about the square of the painting itself. Bottom right, for instance, there is a group comprising four flowers; three of them lie horizontally at equal distance from one another, while above the third flower on the right there floats a fourth of the same species. In other clusters there is a similar dialectical interplay between geometry and disorder. Now and again within the pyramid individual flowers appear, almost like surprise special effects, in this firework display of summer heat." (Gustav Klimt Landscapes, Boston, 1988, p. 19).
Klimt turned to landscape painting relatively late in his career. His first landscape pictures, dating from circa 1898-1899 (cf. Novotny-Dobai nos. 98-99, 106-107), find Klimt employing a vertical format and depicting landscape in a symbolist manner redolent of the work of the Belgian Symbolist, Fernand Khnopff. "Sombre, mysterious, with an indefinable air of allegory, they seemed to embody the essence of the master's early manner". (P. Vergo, Art in Vienna, 1898-1918, London, 1975, p. 79). From 1900 onwards Klimt's landscapes are, without exception, in a square format approximately 1 metre square. "The majority have an extremely high horizon line, or lack one altogether, so that their subjects, whether flower beds, woods or meadows, seem to unfurl before the eye from top to bottom of the canvas, more like tapestries or rugs than painting." (F. Whitford, Klimt, London, 1990, p. 184).
The early years of this century saw dramatic upheavals in the avantgarde art movement in Vienna. In 1897 Klimt had founded the Secession, following the example of the previously established Munich Secession, as an independent autonomous association of young artists who had felt stifled by the conservative bias of the old-fashioned, hierarchical Viennese Künstlerhaus. The Secession brought together painters and sculptors of all styles as well as designers, graphic artists, architects and typographers. It also had as a primary objective the aim of showing contemporary foreign art in Vienna. The Secession had a galvanising effect on Viennese cultural life and established a distinct "Viennese style" in Jugendstil. The close collaboration with designers and craftsmen such as Josef Hoffmann and Josef-Maria Ollbrich further inspired the development of ornamentation in Klimt's work which was to have an important effect on his treatment of lanscape. "In his works of the early 1900s, he experiments constantly with the decorative possibilities offered by the use of materials such as gold and silver, inlay and semi-precious stones; his pictures of this period were on several occasions criticised as not being paintings in the proper sense at all, but objects of applied art. This period of experimentation culminated in the Stoclet-Frieze of 1905-1911, the artist's most advanced use of a composite medium, and the magnificent golden paintings of the years 1907-8." (Vergo, op. cit., p. 38)
A conflict within the Secession itself arose between the "Stylists", led by Klimt, and the "Naturalists", led by Engelhart, which resulted in a split by Klimt's followers in 1905. This split marked the end of the heroic period of the Vienna Secession but unfortunately also meant that the Klimtgruppe had no public exhibition space for its work. However, in 1908, they were offered the lease of a site near the Lothringerstrasse where they built, to a prefabricated design by Hoffmann, an ambitious exhibition complex which was inaugurated with the Kunstschau of 1908. This was the most important single exhibition project in pre-war Vienna and provided a comprehensive round-up of Viennese avantgarde art. Klimt was given a room to himself in which were hung sixteen pictures, probably including Bauerngarten. As Klimt remarked in his opening address to the Kunstschau, "We have not been idle during these exhibitionless years, that on the contrary - perhaps because we have been free from the cares of arranging exhibitions - we have been working all the more industriously, inwardly, on the development of our ideas."
It was during these 'exhibitionless years' in 1905-07 that Bauerngarten was painted. The celebrated dress designer and fashion-house proprietor, Emilie Flöge, had become Klimt's lifelong companion. Although they did not live under the same roof in Vienna, between 1900-1916 they left the stifling heat of the Vienna summer to retreat together to the peace and quiet of the Salzkammergut countryside where Klimt could work in solitude without distraction. There, on the shore of the Attersee, Klimt lived for three months each summer in the company of Emilie Flöge, her mother and her two sisters. The present picture was painted in the garden of a local farmer called Mayr at Litzlberg.
In a letter to Mizzi Zimmerman of August 1903, Klimt described a typical day's work at Attersee: "Early in the morning, mostly about six, a little earlier or later - I get up - if the weather is good I go into the forest nearby - I'm painting a little beech wood there (in the sun) with a few conifers in between, that lasts until 8 o'clock, then we have breakfast, after that a swim in the lake, taken with due care - after that again a little painting, when the sun's shining a picture of the lake, when the weather's overcast a landscape from the window of my room - often I don't paint in the morning but instead study my Japanese books - outside in the open. So midday comes, after eating, a little nap or reading - until afternoon coffee - before or after coffee a second swim in the lake, not regularly but mostly. After coffee it's painting again - a large poplar at twilight with a storm coming on - now and again instead of this evening painting but that's rare - then dusk - dinner - then in good time to bed and again in good time up the next morning. Now and again in this division of the day there's a little rowing in order to get my muscles toned up." (Whitford, loc. cit., p. 180). So it was that Klimt's landscape paintings are always summer pictures. The joyous mood reflects his own contentment with his surroundings. It appears that he reserved working on his portrait pictures for the winter campaign in his Vienna studio.
However, Klimt's landscapes echo his portrait works in many ways. The similarity of technique and penchant for ornamentation found in his portraits is plainly evident in such a work as Bauerngarten, but even more striking is the manner in which Klimt's landscapes assume an anthropomorphic nature. In Bauerngarten the pyramidal arrangement of flowers closely resembles the format of the celebrated contemporaneous portrait of Fritza Riedler (Novotny-Dobai 143, Oesterreichische Galerie, Vienna). In the landscape Klimt seems to be consciously working in parallel with the portrait, imbuing the subject with a human quality despite the overall decorative effect. It is intriguing to note that Klimt's landscapes are almost always devoid of human presence and that his portraits are almost always of figures in enclosed, hermetic settings without allusions to landscape or nature. Frank Whitford observes, "It might be thought that nature provided Klimt with subjects more congenial to his temperament and better suited to his style than portraits: the individuality of his sitters ultimately resisted all his attempts to subjugate them to the tyranny of decoration. Nature is more amenable to such treatment; lakes, flower beds, forests and meadows more obviously provide the basis for elaborate stylisation and patternmaking than do human beings, no matter how extravagantly dressed." (op. cit., p. 177). The duality of treatment finds its climax in this "Golden Period" of Klimt with the mosaic patternmaking of Bauerngarten and the Bildnis Adele Bloch-Bauer I of 1907 (Novotny-Dobai 150, Oesterreichische Galerie, Vienna), both shown in the 1908 Kunstschau.
Nature has an important role in Klimt's art, not just from the fact that a quarter of his output consists of landscapes or because of the symbiotic relationship of his landscapes and his portrait pictures. C. M. Nebehay described him as "one of the most significant landscape painters of his time...He saw in landscape the means of entering a mood, a sort of creative stimulus like a "jewel", a "firework", he saw the landscape's structure and the unfolding of elemental biological life forces, but the secret of his art as a landscape painter lies in the manner in which these different ways of seeing are layered and interlaced...The landscape was for him a place of contemplation, source of joy but also of sorrow." (S. Partsch, Klimt, Life and Work, London, 1989, p. 288). Dobai writes that "the locus of Klimt's thematic material is the erotic, which branches into its sexual and biological aspects. The predilection toward the erotic can be noted both in figural compositions and in landscape...The early landscapes often show a swamp, or a glistening water surface; later they become close-ups of vegetation, transformed into a rich and sensuous surface. Paintings of gardens are frequent. The theme of the profusion was well-known in Vienna; but Klimt's constantly repeated ornamentalised leaves and flowers stress the unfree and predetermined aspect of the bioogical world...after 1900 [he] often made use of the pointilist technique, transformed into a pervasive luminous vibration. In other landscapes, a construction of parallel planes of foliage suggests the experience of isolation and alienation. This "manneristic distance" is heightened by the luxuriance of Klimt's colour. In effect, the panerotic quality of the figurative pictures, which caused a great deal of protest, including a parliamentary investigation, was consistently carried through in Klimt's landscapes." (Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, New York, 1965, pp. 23-24).
In the three climactic 1905-1907 garden paintings, exemplified by Bauerngarten, "Klimt is not chiefly interested in the faithful rendering of optical impressions of the transitory effects of light and air. His paintings are faithful to what he saw, yet at the same time they go beyond it. They use design and texture, pattern and colour, in order to make the transitory permanent, to arrest the fleeting, to transform and fix a world that is constantly changing and decaying into an immutable paradise." (Whitford, op. cit., p. 184).
The outstanding qualities of Klimt's landscape paintings were recognised at the time by the poet Peter Altenberg who termed the Klimt room at the 1908 Kunstschau, in which Bauerngarten was probably first exhibited, "the Gustav Klimt cathedral of modern art" and went on to write in his review, "Are you an upright, tender friend of nature? Then allow your eyes to feast on these pictures: country gardens, beech woods, roses, sunflowers, poppies flowering! The landscape is treated as the women are, elevated, exalted, romantic! This is right, this is sacred, visible even to the sceptics with their jaded eyes! Gustav Klimt, a mysterious blend of primeval peasant and historical Romantic, praise be to you."
Bauerngarten was probably not only exhibited at the 1908 Kunstschau but also at the 1909 Kunstschau the following year. Following this it was exhibited in Prague at the Deutsch-Böhmischer Künstlerbund in 1910. It was then purchased by the Narodni Galerie in Prague the same year (inventory number 04107).