XI. Reception, restitution, and the modern Klimt

Klimt's reputation has had three phases. In his lifetime he was, in Vienna, the most celebrated and most controversial painter of the age — the leader of the Secession, the scandal of the University pictures, the favourite of the wealthy Jewish collectors who bought his portraits and his landscapes, and the master whom the young revered. Abroad he was less known; the golden pictures did not travel, and the international fame came later.

The middle phase was eclipse. The generation after 1918 — the age of the Bauhaus, of abstraction, of the machine aesthetic — found Klimt's ornament decadent, his eroticism dated, his gold vulgar; the Viennese Jugendstil was the very thing modernism defined itself against, and for half a century Klimt was a period curiosity, admired for the drawings and dismissed for the gold. The Nazi years were a catastrophe for the pictures and their owners: the Jewish collections that held most of Klimt's work — the Lederers, the Bloch-Bauers, the Zuckerkandls — were looted or forced into sale; the University paintings and other works were burned at Schloss Immendorf in 1945; and the survivors entered Austrian public and private collections under clouds of stolen title that would not be resolved for sixty years.

The third phase is the modern apotheosis. From the 1960s the reappraisal of Vienna 1900 — Carl Schorske's Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (1980) above all — restored Klimt to the centre of the story of modernism, as the painter of the Freudian city, the artist of the surface and the abyss; the golden pictures became, through reproduction, among the most familiar images in the world (The Kiss on every poster and coffee-mug); and the restitution battles made Klimt a byword for Holocaust justice. In 2006 the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, restituted after a landmark legal case to Adele's niece Maria Altmann, was sold to the Neue Galerie in New York for a then-record $135 million; the case, told in the film Woman in Gold, made the painting the emblem of the looted-art reckoning. The present Klimt is at once the most reproduced and the most contested of modern painters: the maker of the world's favourite image of love, and the painter whose œuvre is a map of a destroyed civilisation and its stolen inheritance.

Schorske and the modern reading

The intellectual event that made the modern Klimt was Carl Schorske's Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980), which read Klimt's art — the University scandal above all — as the record of the liberal bourgeoisie's retreat from a failed politics into the private realm of the psyche, the garden and the erotic: the gilded interior as a refuge from a public world that liberalism could no longer master. Klimt's turn from the public commission to the portrait, the landscape and the allegory of instinct became, in Schorske's account, the paradigm of Vienna 1900 — the birth of the modern psychological self out of the crisis of liberal reason, the same crisis that produced Freud. The reading has been qualified and contested since, but it restored Klimt to the centre of the history of modernism and gave the gold its meaning: not decadence but symptom, the beautiful surface of a civilisation that had lost faith in its own public rationality and turned inward, to the body and the dream, on the eve of the catastrophe. The subsequent apotheosis — the reproductions, the record prices, the restitution dramas, the film Woman in Gold (2015) — has made Klimt at once the most popular and the most historically freighted of modern painters.

The market has followed the fame. Since the 2006 sale of Adele Bloch-Bauer I for $135 million, Klimt's pictures have stood at the very top of the art market: the late landscapes, the second Bloch-Bauer portrait, and the Lady with a Fan (sold in 2023 for £85.3 million, a European auction record) command sums that place him with the very few. The prices are inseparable from the histories — many of the pictures reach the market through restitution, the reckoning with the looting of the Jewish collections — and from the ubiquity of the images that reproduction has made among the most familiar in the world. The Belvedere in Vienna, which holds The Kiss, Judith I and the Beethoven Frieze, is a place of pilgrimage; the Leopold Museum and the Neue Galerie in New York hold much of the rest; and the University pictures, the greatest loss, survive only as photographs. Klimt is now both everywhere and, in his destroyed masterpieces, nowhere — the most reproduced and the most lost of modern masters.

The fire at Immendorf

The single greatest loss deserves to be named. In May 1945, in the last days of the war, retreating SS troops set fire to Schloss Immendorf in Lower Austria, where a large group of Klimt's paintings had been stored for safekeeping — among them the three University ceiling pictures (Philosophy, Medicine, Jurisprudence), the Beethoven-related canvases, Jurisprudence, portraits and allegories from the Lederer collection, and much else. Everything burned. It was the largest single destruction of Klimt's work, and it fell on the very pictures — the University allegories above all — that had been the most ambitious and controversial of his career; the greatest of his statements on philosophy, medicine and law, the works over which he had fought the professors and abandoned public art, survive only in a handful of black-and-white photographs and preparatory studies. The fire is the reason the Klimt one can see is, for all its splendour, a fragment: the monumental allegories that were the centre of his public ambition are gone, and the golden portraits and the summer landscapes that remain, precious as they are, are the surviving margins of a larger and darker achievement that the twentieth century destroyed.