Changing tack

Gustav Klimt first came to Venice in the spring of 1899, in pursuit of Alma Schindler, the young stepdaughter of his friend and fellow artist Carl Moll. The nascent love affair between the artist, who was then in his late thirties, and the 19-year-old Alma was brought to an abrupt end when the girl’s mother read her diary and Klimt was asked to leave. Three years later she married Mahler. But before Klimt departed from Venice, Klimt and Alma had visited San Marco where, as Alma recorded, the Basilica’s mosaics, glittering in the half-light, made a profound impression on him.

Although he had experimented with gold-painted highlights in his ‘Pallas Athene’ of the year before, the Venice visit, according to Alfred Weidinger of the Belvedere in Vienna and the curator of this evocative exhibition, stimulated Klimt to make lavish use of the gold leaf that was to become the trademark of his ‘Gold Period’.

Timed to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Klimt’s birth, this exhibition demonstrates the extraordinary transformation Klimt’s style underwent during the 1890s.

The son of a poor goldsmith, Klimt entered Vienna’s applied arts school at 14, where he received a thorough traditional training in drawing and painting. He was joined there by his brother Ernst and Franz Matsch. Three years later the trio went into partnership and over the next decade they gained substantial commissions for decorative schemes for public buildings, including theatres in Bohemia, Romania, and for the new Burgtheater and Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

The first room of the show displays academic male nudes and portraits by all three from these early days, which reveal a remarkable homogeneity in style and contain no hints of the radical change that Klimt’s art would later undergo.