Among the most fascinating inclusions are 26 of the 51 small collotype photographs from the “Das Werk von Gustav Klimt” portfolio — spread across the exhibition’s three galleries. They float in the background, forming a hushed review of Klimt’s painting career. Here you’ll find more of his late 1890s transitional landscapes and recurring compositional devices. One is the isolation of a vertical group of figures or flowers at the center of some paintings, whether landscapes like «Sunflower» or one of his most famous figurative works, «The Kiss «. Collotypes of the two are displayed side by side in the second gallery of the exhibition.
Some of Klimt’s paintings only exist today as collotype reproductions. Several originals were destroyed during World War II; others have been reworked. For example, Klimt’s portrait of Emilie Flöge in 1902-03, seen here in collotype, was one of his first decorative portraits. Shortly after it was photographed for the portfolio, Klimt reworked it, adapting it to his later works. He intensified the blue, divided his designs into finer, more mosaic patterns, and added the sparkle of silver.
As you progress through this show, the dots connect in visual and historical terms. The installation makes it unusually clear that Hoffmann’s famous brooches are small gardens with flowers and trees that dialogue with Klimt’s landscapes – which, like them, are also square, emphasizing their modernity.
You may discover another such connection when you reach the third and final gallery of the exhibition, where the five late landscapes seem to almost fill the entire space with their dense foliage. Some of the trunks in these photos have sinuous brown trunks, speckled with green, black and gray.
Between their curves and their slightly hallucinatory patterns, they evoke certain subjects of Klimt portraits and their flowing clothes. As if to bear witness to this unexpected connection, Klimt’s unfinished «Portrait of Ria Munk III» (1917-1918) hangs on an adjacent wall, an almost life-size image of a dark-haired woman in a loose-fitting dress with flowers which is roughly drawn in pencil. Behind her are bands of more or less real flowers, stylized or transformed into decorative objects, a true sketch of the creation of the Secession-Werkstätte.
I doubt there have been many exhibitions of Klimt like this bracing, serendipitous study of his life and times, with an unusually effective use of extreme context. By the time you reach the final gallery to savor the admittedly small group of late landscapes, you may have a different idea of how many paintings are needed to make an exhibition of this size and still have meaning. I did it.