Gustav Klimt at the water’s edge: the story of Litzlbergkeller

On the far shore of Attersee, a lake in Upper Austria, a white house appears among the trees. Its roof rises beneath a canopy of green; the surrounding foliage breaks into flickers of yellow, violet and blue. Below, the scene begins again, loosed by water into shimmering bands of colour. There are no boats arriving at the shore, no guests lingering outside the inn, no suggestion of the summer crowds that gathered there. In Litzlbergkeller, painted in 1915-1916, Gustav Klimt has distilled the lakeside retreat into a vision of remote tranquility.

Yet the quietude of the painting belies the history of the place it depicts. At the turn of the 20th century, Attersee was a popular destination for the Sommerfrische, when Viennese families left the city for extended stays along the lakeside. Litzlbergkeller — a brewery and inn with guest rooms, a restaurant and a boathouse — was not only part of this summer culture, but one of the defining places of Klimt’s life. Beginning in 1900, Klimt spent eight consecutive summers in Litzlberg with the Flöge family, including his closest companion and muse, Emilie Flöge. Fifteen years later, looking back across the lake from its opposite shore, he transformed that familiar, social setting into something suspended between observation and memory.

Those personal associations would not end with the painting’s creation. Its subsequent history would extend these connections between people and place, passing through the hands of figures who shaped not only Klimt’s life, but also his legacy.

On 17 November, Litzlbergkeller will feature in Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale in New York, returning to auction for the first time in nearly three decades. Acquired by the family of the present owner at the 1997 estate sale of collector and gallerist Serge Sabarsky — where it set a then-record for Klimt at auction — the painting has most recently been on long-term loan to Vienna’s Leopold Museum. Its return to New York comes at a particularly resonant moment: five days earlier, on 12 November, Neue Galerie will reopen its doors after a multi-phased construction project with a 25th-anniversary exhibition celebrating the institution Sabarsky helped conceive.

Klimt’s beloved escape

At Litzlberg, away from the professional and social pressures of Vienna, Klimt found a setting in which his closest personal relationships and his work could coexist. His ties to the Flöges extended beyond his relationship with Emilie: her sister Helene had married Klimt’s younger brother Ernst, and after Ernst’s early death in 1892, the two families remained closely connected. During their summers together, Klimt swam — an activity that was frowned upon in polite society — rowed and painted the surrounding landscape, establishing a summer ritual he would return to for much of the rest of his life. ‘In Litzlberg, Klimt found the tranquility and models of nature he needed for his work,’ art historian Stephan Koja has written. ‘The surroundings of the brewery provided a permanent source of inspiration.’

The landscape offered a corresponding degree of artistic freedom. Unlike the portraits he produced for his wealthy Viennese patrons, Klimt’s landscapes were largely painted for himself, and Attersee became the principal testing ground for the genre. There, he developed the square format, high horizons and increasingly compressed fields of colour and pattern that came to define his mature landscapes. When Klimt and the Flöges left Litzlberg in 1908, moving across the lake to Villa Oleander near Kammer, his relationship with Attersee continued even as his physical perspective of the lake changed.

Composing the scene

‘The inn of Litzlbergkeller sits at the water’s edge, between Klimt’s allover technique and abstraction, form and dissolution, prewar certainties and the unknown,’ says Max Carter, Global Chairman of 20th and 21st Century Art at Christie’s. 

By the time he began painting Litzlbergkeller in 1915, the inn itself belonged to Klimt’s past. Europe was at war, and his mother had died earlier that year. From the opposite shore at Villa Oleander, aided by the optical devices he had begun using years before, Klimt turned his attention towards his former summer home. The distance was now both physical and temporal. The telescope brought the inn near while compressing house, forest and water into an intricately worked surface. Klimt eliminated its dock and stairs and suppressed the surrounding development, isolating a place once animated by summer visitors within an enveloping screen of foliage.

‘This landscape reads like a lyrical composition in three stanze — the forest with majestic, whispering oak trees; the house embraced by their foliage; the shimmering reflection in the lake,’ says Giovanna Bertazzoni, Chairman of Christie’s Europe. The three elements are bound together by Klimt’s densely worked surface: vegetation gathers around the white architecture before giving way into its reflection below. The place remains recognisable, but the social world Klimt had known there has disappeared by his own hand.

Yet even as Klimt removed those traces of human presence from the canvas, Litzlbergkeller was already bound to another of the crucial relationships that shaped his life. The painting had been commissioned by the banker and entrepreneur Otto Primavesi, one of Klimt’s most important patrons and a close friend. Together with his wife, Eugenia, Primavesi assembled a significant collection of Klimt’s work, including portraits of Eugenia and their daughter Mäda. On 3 May 1916, Klimt wrote to Otto to report that Litzlbergkeller was ‘now finished’. Rooted in Klimt’s own experience of Attersee, the landscape now entered the collection of a family closely connected to his professional life.

A New York homecoming

The painting’s later association with Serge Sabarsky belongs to an entirely different chapter of Klimt’s story — one concerned less with the artist’s life than with his legacy. An Austrian-born dealer and collector, Sabarsky established himself in New York in 1968 and became an influential advocate for Austrian and German modernism in the United States. His early clients included Ronald and Leonard Lauder, and with Ronald he began imagining a New York museum devoted to the art and design of Austria and Germany. Neue Galerie, which opened in 2001, five years after Sabarsky’s death, was the eventual realization of that ambition. ‘This museum is about Serge’s vision, about his love of art, and about our friendship,’ Ronald later said.

The museum’s reopening this November therefore brings that legacy, and the painting’s own history, unusually close to the present. As Neue Galerie begins its 25th anniversary season, Litzlbergkeller will return to auction only blocks away at Rockefeller Center.