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Klimt's most valuable painting, which survived Nazi looting, comes to light

2023-02-17T04:47:52.075Z


'Water Snakes II', stolen during World War II and currently in the hands of an anonymous owner, stars in a dazzling exhibition at the Belvedere in Vienna


The date of the premiere was approaching and the wall that the star work of the exhibition was supposed to display ran the risk of being left bare.

The teams of curators from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Belvedere in Vienna had worked for seven years on a new interpretation of the figure of Gustav Klimt and had obtained the loan of pieces by Rodin, Matisse and Cézanne to confront them with the artist's capital works. Austrian, but missing

Water Serpents II

, Klimt's most expensive painting.

The millionaire cost of the insurance far exceeded the state civil liability limit of 120 million euros set by law.

At the last minute, an agreement was reached: the owner (anonymous) would assume the six-figure insurance premium and in return the Belvedere would restore the canvas.

More information

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The work has a troubled history: it was stolen by the Nazis from the Jewish textile businesswoman Jenny Steiner, a patron of Klimt and the secessionist movement.

When it was going to be auctioned in 1940, the Governor of the Reich in Vienna, Baldur von Schirach, removed it from the lot and presented it on a platter to the Nazi filmmaker Gustav Ucicky, Klimt's illegitimate son, who hung it in his dining room.

In 2013, the Ucicky and Steiner estates signed a restitution agreement, dividing the $112 million from their sale equally.

Then the speculation typical of the current art market followed, with another almost immediate private sale to a Russian oligarch that exceeded 180 million dollars, who in turn resold it for a similar amount.

Klimt painted it between 1904 and 1907 and in all this time it has barely been exposed to the public.

In mid-January, he walked through the doors of the Belvedere restoration workshop, a high-ceilinged studio that occupies the old palace stables, among three-meter jungle monsteras and an effusive smell of varnish and thinner.

The head of restoration, Stefanie Jahn, with a team of eight experts, carried out the damage examination in just two weeks and restored slight cracking, cracks of less than two millimeters.

“The canvas is in an enviable state,” says Jahn, who speaks like an entomologist about the priceless finishing touches on each letter, each signature, each Klimt painting.

Some of the paintings exhibited in the exhibition 'Klimt.

Inspired by Van Gogh, Rodin, Matisse…' in the Belverde museum in Vienna.Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna

If we consider that the canvas has survived the decomposition of an empire, two world wars, a civil war, and Aryanization and looting by the Nazis, that's good news.

The owner has secured valuable expertise from the museum's conservation department with the world's largest collection of Klimt's works, including

The Kiss

.

The restorer personally designed the cyclopean X-ray machine that x-rays boards with two-meter rails, and which has its own room in the workshop.

Scanning has revealed Klimt's sketches on the canvas;

The changes of him in the composition of nymphs, aquatic serpents and golden threads of climbing plants, which some art historians interpret as a representation of lesbian eroticism.

Klimt painted with precious metals, fine sheets of gold, silver and platinum.

“The brown fish seen here,” says Jahn, comparing a reproduction of the painting with microscopic photographs, “were originally silver in color, they have undergone the oxidation process.

This cannot be corrected."

And, almost accidentally, she adds the argument of the exhibition:

Klimt.

Inspired by Van Gogh, Rodin, Matisse...

it was first shown in Amsterdam in autumn, with another title but with the neons already on in

Water Snakes II

, and is now exhibiting it until May 29 at the Belvedere to celebrate its 300th anniversary as a space of art.

There are differences: in Vienna the main painting is exhibited together with

Water Snakes I

(which was not moved to Amsterdam for conservation reasons), and both are opposite works by the artist Macdonald Mackintosh, the only woman to appear in the exhibition together to thirty international artists.

In total, it brings together more than 90 pieces to dismantle the myth of the lone genius who created in a blue robe in a garden surrounded by naked muses (among them, the model Maria Učická) and brilliantly presents his catalog of influences.

Curator Markus Fellinger says: “Our investigation uncovers a very different Klimt than usual.

Starting with a series of significant comparisons, we illustrate how he assimilated the artistic achievements of his time."

Klimt was a sponge.

When he co-founded the Secession in 1897, an association of transgressive artists, he not only broke with the willful blindness of academic painting, but also attracted the avant-garde like a magnet.

Vienna, which until then was unaware of them, became a center of gravity of modernity.

It was the Secession that first exhibited a Van Gogh painting in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1903, in an exhibition attended by 16,000 people.

And with him, Paul Cézanne, Pierre Bonnard, Toulouse-Lautrec, authors who had never been cited in the local press.

The painting 'Judith', which Klimt painted in 1901.Belvedere Museum

Everyone is at the Belvedere today, on a tour that poses a splendid confrontation of illustrious firms.

It is surprising to see the similarities between the landscapes of Klimt and those of Van Gogh;

between Klimt's golden period, with his

Judith

in the front row, and the symbolists Fernand Khnopff and Franz von Stuck;

between Klimt's drawings of female nudes and Rodin's sculptures;

between Klimt and the subversion of poster art by Pierre Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec;

between Klimt and Matisse, Monet, Manet, Alma-Tadema…

In the last room is the painting

Summer Night on the Beach

, by Edvard Munch, also exhibited by the Secession in 1904. And next to it,

The Bride

, the imposing work that Klimt left unfinished on the easel in 1918, when he died of pneumonia at the age of 55 during the flu epidemic.

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Source: elparis

All life articles on 2023-02-17

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