Gustav Klimt's artworks brighten a tour of Austria

Author: By Doug Hubley, Globe Correspondent

Date: SUNDAY, March 8, 1998

Page: M13

Section: Travel

So what a relief it was to have the vast spaces of the Museum for Applied Arts all to ourselves. Filling shelf after shelf in an upstairs gallery were artifacts of Josef Hoffmann and the Vienna Workshops (Wiener Werkstatte), everyday objects -- a cigarette box, a flower pot, a wallet -- transformed into elegant, ingenious gems. And what a splendid surprise to round a corner and discover the Klimt Tour's big payoff: walls full of Gustav Klimt's work that we hadn't expected. The guidebook had mentioned ``Klimt sketches,'' but what sketches! -- full-size plans, a.k.a. ``cartoons,'' of the mosaic frieze he designed for the Stoclet Palace in Brussels.

Resplendent in full color, swirling pattern, and Klimt's trademark gold paint, there they were: ``The Tree of Life,'' ``The Embrace,'' ``Expectation.'' Penciled scribbles on the brown paper, instructions for the finished product in The Man's own hand, gave a thrill of historical intimacy.

Our day was transformed and the Klimt Tour, happily, ended on a higher note than we had foreseen. But any Klimt at all would have been just fine, for it was Gustav Klimt, after all, who brought us to Vienna. Our first trip to Europe together gave my partner her chance to see firsthand the work and world of this man who, foremost among the members of the Vienna Secession, unleashed the hounds of visual expressionism. There were many other things to see along the way, but the painter of ``The Kiss'' was the object of our mission. In researching and planning the Klimt Tour, we learned that, given the right circumstances, you can do much worse than to orient your trip around one artist. Also, as obvious as it may sound, we learned anew that the finest art reproductions can't compete with seeing the real item.

It was a happy coincidence that we visited Vienna in 1997, for the more we learned about the capital of fin-de-siecle angst, the more 100-year anniversaries we spotted. Chief among them was the centennial of the founding of the Vienna Secession, the group of more than 20 cranky artists, led by Klimt, who rejected the conservative arts establishment. It was a rare pleasure to walk those streets and try to see what Klimt saw -- 100 years and a war's devastation later, much is still the same.

In 1998, two centennials, both marked by major special exhibits, will bring fin-de-siecle Vienna into still higher relief. In 1898, the Secession Pavilion, a Jugendstil (``youth style'') masterpiece that some consider Europe's first example of modern architecture, opened. The exhibition ``A Century of Artistic Expression: 100 Years Vienna Secession'' runs April 3-June 21.

Also that year, an anarchist stabbed to death Elisabeth, wife of Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef, the ``unhappy empress'' who remains the object of a large and fervent cult following. (The Imperial Palace in central Vienna, Schonbrunn palace, and the Hermes Villa are the sites of exhibits dedicated to ``Sissi'' from April 2, 1998, to Feb. 16, 1999.)

Like so much else in Vienna, our living situation was a distinctive mix of rare pleasures and weird annoyances. Our home was a dorm room at the Academy of Music (Hochschule fur Musik), on Johannesgasse, just seconds from Karntner Strasse, central Vienna's main drag, and Stephansplatz, the heart of the city's heart. We stepped up to the reception window simultaneously with 100 or so young Japanese band musicians, resplendent in turquoise blazers. No Klimt Tour for them: The stickers on their suitcases read ``Success Road Europe.'' We quickly brightened up the room with a clothesline across the middle, which not only spiffed up the decor but compensated for dorm laundry facilities that were always either in use by cranky cleaning ladies or broken. Our tall windows opened on a leafy courtyard that made every sound public. At times we sat amid the dripping laundry, sipping beer or slivovitz, listening to the student singers and pianists practice their work.

The bathrooms were far down echoing corridors. Our first priority after settling in was to buy a bathrobe. We found one at Steffl, a department store on Karntner Strasse. But that was our second attempt.

The first took us into a high-toned clothier's where, in my inadequate German, I tried to explain that we needed a bathrobe we both could wear. I knew there was a German word ``Robe,'' and used it. I forgot it means ``dress.'' This revealed that the Viennese are more conservative than I had thought.

We kicked off the Klimt Tour the following day with the Secession Pavilion. That was appropriate, because it was with the founding of the Vienna Secession in 1897 that modern Viennese visual art blossomed. Disdaining the commercialism and stodgy historicism of the conservative establishment, Klimt, Hoffmann, and 19 others struck out in favor of unrestricted expression and democratic principles.

Their motto, still emblazoned in gold over the Pavilion entrance, remains timely in this age of creeping censorship: ``To Every Age Its Art, To Every Art Its Freedom'' (and, we would add, to every famous painting its tour group). Designed by Josef Olbrich, completed in 1898 after only six months of construction, this exhibition hall was a ringing proclamation of Jugendstil. Like its predecessor Art Nouveau, Jugendstil borrowed imagery from nature, and, espousing a remarriage of fine and applied arts, philosophy from the English Arts and Crafts movement.

Crowning the cream-colored pavilion is a gilded openwork dome the Viennese call ``the golden cabbage''; ceramic turtles carry planters in front. Deliberately designed to clash with the grandiose architecture elsewhere on the Ringstrasse, the gleaming pavilion now faces unfair competition from rush-hour traffic and towering tour buses.

Although the Secession adheres to its founding tradition of showing contemporary art, we were there for Klimt's Beethoven Frieze. Created for a 1902 celebration of Beethoven, the frieze, now on permanent loan from the Austrian Gallery (Osterreichische Galerie) at Belvedere Palace, was reinstalled here in 1983.

The frieze, more than 100 feet long, is high on the walls of a basement room awash with a languid white light. An elderly guard sat motionless near the entrance while quiet visitors looked up, looked down at the interpretive pamphlet, looked up. It was a treat to see the frieze panels in order after years of seeing them separately in reproduction. Executed in a variety of paints, crayons, stucco, and applique, the frieze perfectly exemplifies both the goals of Jugendstil and Klimt's bent toward allegory.

The frieze is based on Wagner's interpretation of Beethoven's ``Symphony No. 9,'' depicting poor old humanity's striving for happiness against a hostile world. In the end, it says, poetry leads to an ideal kingdom where we'll find ``true happiness, pure bliss, and absolute love.'' But Klimt's heavenly choir and embracing couple, it must be said, are overshadowed by the hostile powers. Various unwholesome-looking nudes representing a host of untoward qualities -- sickness, wantonness, what have you -- are presided over by Typhoeus, a giant ape with mother-of-pearl eyes and cold blue wings. Heaven is divine, but evil makes the front page.

Allegorically satiated but hungry and confused, we went to the nearby Museum Cafe to regroup. We lingered for a tranquil hour, enjoying coffee, plum cake, and apple strudel, not to mention Adolf Loos's original 1899 interior, all smooth curves, red leather upholstery, mustard-colored paint glowing in the sun.

If we had wanted plums instead of plum cake, another choice would have been the nearby Naschmarkt. The next day we did tour Vienna's famed open-air market, wandering for an hour with our mouths hanging open. A feast for all the senses, the market presents larger amounts of more varieties of food, raw and prepared, than you could eat in several lifetimes. I did get as far as squeezing a peach, which brought a Saddam Hussein look-alike out of his booth to yell at me.

The Beethoven Frieze is a useful orientation point for a good chunk of the Klimt Tour. Located on Friedrichstrasse, the Secession Pavilion is midway among three Klimt destinations. In addition, it's right around the corner from the Secessionists' nemesis, the Academy of Fine Arts, across from Schillerplatz. The Academy's Gallery of Paintings shows no Klimt but has Bosch's ``Last Judgment'' and a captivating display of work by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Martin Luther's favorite painter.

About a half-mile west of the Secession is the famed Museum of Fine Art (Kunsthistorisches Museum), glowering across the sprawling Maria-Theresien Platz at the equally imposing Natural History Museum. In 1892, Gustav Klimt, his brother Ernst and their colleague Franz Matsch made a splash with their paintings on tympana and between columns along the museum's grand stairway. Today, these images may seem a little straight, but these subjects, from antiquity up through the Renaissance, are ones Klimt would return to throughout his career. For all that, the Klimts are the least of the attractions at this enormous museum, renowned for the sheer size of its collections as well as their quality. Given a couple of days and a fresh brain, you can see everything from Vermeer's famed ``Allegory of the Art of Painting'' to a gold saltcellar by Cellini. We spent our time there, when we weren't lost, in Room X, craning around tour groups to peer at paintings that represent more than half the surviving works of Breughel the Elder. Across the Burgring from the Kunsthistorisches Museum is the vast labyrinth of the Hofburg, the imperial residence for seven centuries. No Klimt here -- only such must-sees as the Spanish Riding School, the Imperial Chapel, the National Library, and a slew of museums, from a collection of court silver and crystal to the Ethnological Museum, home of Montezuma's headdress. The obligatory afternoon thunderstorm drove us into the Imperial Apartments at the Hofburg, where we raced a tour group through countless chambers. The Secession is best understood in the context of Habsburg opulence, and here that opulence is at its most oppressive, a dreary succession of gilt, plushy crimson rooms. Even the royals sought relief from it: Here we saw Franz-Joesph's tiny army bed and the forlorn wooden gymnastics set belonging to the obsessive, reluctant Empress Elisabeth.

East of Friedrichstrasse are two more Klimt collections. The nearest, just blocks away on Karlsplatz, resides at the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna (Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien) and includes his controversial ``Pallas Athena,'' from 1898. We were disappointed to find no Klimts on display during our visit, but we did see a mind-boggling Vienna chronicle presented in all manner of artifacts and documents, with interpretive information in German only. We consoled ourselves nearby with Otto Wagner's ornate 1898 Jugendstil pavilions for the Stadtbahn, forerunner to the present subway system.

We had better luck in the same part of the city, but considerably farther from the Secession. In fact, we found the Klimt mother lode: the Austrian Gallery at Belvedere Palace.

It was warm, close, and threatening rain when we made the long walk out through the gray blocks of Prinz Eugen-Strasse to Belvedere Palace. Belvedere is actually two palaces, upper and lower, set amid extensive formal gardens. Originally the summer home of Prince Eugene of Savoy, the ugly little fellow who drove the Turks back from the gates of Vienna, the complex was finished in 1722 and is considered the crowning achievement of architect Lucas von Hildebrandt.

The complex is also home to the biggest and best collection of Austrian art. The lower palace and the adjacent Orangerie contain baroque and medieval artworks. We never saw them. Our goal was the upper palace, home not only to a choice rococo interior but, more to the point, a gold mine for anyone interested in Austrian art of the last two centuries. Works on display start with the Neo-Classicists, run through Biedermeier and split into the diverse currents of the late 1800s.

If Mr. K was the main attraction for us, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka tied us up for quite a while. Younger than their mentor Klimt, these artists hustled past his allegorical hot buttons and his ideals of beauty to capture the neuroticism and decadence of sunset in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. If they lack the grace and staying power of the best Klimts, Schiele's lubricious women and desolate landscapes, and Kokoschka's vibrating portraits and genre scenes have their own force and fascination. The Klimts ranged from the too-familiar to the deliciously obscure. Dominating one wall and one tour group was ``The Kiss,'' huge and glowing gold, a big hit 90 years ago and a bigger one now, yet powerful enough in person to transcend the cliche that it's become. Opposite were a collection of Klimt landscapes, works whose densely harmonized colors and flattened perspective were revelations to me. These were landscapes rendered as psychic interiors, claustrophobic and chaotic.

Alone in a corner, in a glass case, stood ``Water Serpents I (The Friends),'' a work on parchment much smaller and more frail than we had expected. This was Klimt at his most limpid and his water-women at their most somnolent: skin creamy, hair flowing, adrift amid gold tendrils of water weed.

Bracketing the door through which we'd entered were paintings that, seen in person, were literally redefined for us. These ``Damenbildnisse,'' lady portraits, brought home our reasons for the Klimt Tour. We had seen reproductions of the portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer and Fritza Riedler before and hadn't quite gotten them, the aristocratic faces and arms pressed onto flat patterned masses of gold or silver.

Seeing them now, the light bulb lit. Oil paint has a quality that reproductions can't convey, my partner explained: ``There's a luminosity and a sparkle that you don't get from ink.'' What daylight and oil paint revealed here was the subtle way Klimt created perspective. Suddenly, what I had read as random blocks of pattern around the figures translated into spatial depth, and I could see the chairs the models sat in, the walls and floors of the rooms they occupied.

And then those things seemed so obvious.

``Oh, wow,'' I said.

``That's why we go to museums,'' my partner said.

The Klimt Tour was a first for us, and, despite our research and planning, there were things we could have done better, or at least differently. Crowds, confusion, and non-Klimt objectives all gummed up the Klimt Tour. Our biggest missed opportunity was the Burgtheater, where, in the early 1890s, the Klimts and Franz Matsch painted a history of theatrical arts that won the emperor's praise (and prize money).

In planning the tour, we looked first to Gabriela Belli's ``Gustav Klimt: Masterpieces'' (Bulfinch Press, 1990) for a general idea of which Klimt images were in the city. Next we hit the guidebooks, to confirm where Klimt was being shown, learn what else might be worth seeing nearby -- only a few lifetimes' worth -- and double-check basics like times of operation. If you only have six days in town, you don't want to waste time traveling to a closed attraction.

By the same token, when you actually get into town, make some calls to ensure that what you want to see is actually on display. As we learned to our disappointment, guidebook information is not failsafe. Another big klimt, I mean crimp, in our experience was in the timing. Circumstances dictated that we go in July, but that's when everyone hits the major European destinations. Nothing will color your experience of a place like trying to see it over the heads of a crowd.

We also started out with the idea that, by walking to our Klimt destinations, we could scope out other points of interest and gain a feel for the city. More often, what we gained was tired feet and confused minds. Next time, we'll save the long walks for postprandial recovery and ride the streetcar directly to the places we most want to see.

Vienna's splendid public transportation system combines buses, streetcars, and the U-Bahn. One-, three- and eight-day tickets make mass transit a breeze. You may want to consider the Vienna Card, which combines 72 hours of unlimited mass transit access with admission discounts to museums and other attractions; the card costs about $15.

As memorable and gratifying as it was to see the Klimts of Vienna, we realized along the way that the Klimt Tour had an additional payoff that was equally important. To visit a city that embodies 1,900 years of history at the crossroads of central Europe, a city whose 90 museums and countless other attractions could keep a culture hound sniffing around for years, we realized that it helps to have an organizing principle for a visit. Knowing that we couldn't see everything, we simply let the Klimt Tour help us prioritize: Klimt first, nearby attractions next, and work the other must-sees into spare time. If we missed some big attractions because we would rather see Klimt (too bad about that Habsburg tableware collection), there are plenty of others that we caught along the way. And there's always next time.

Albertina Graphics Collection -- In ``Sacred Spring: Drawings and Prints From the Time of the Secession's Founding,'' the Albertina's temporary gallery will show, among other works, Klimt's century-old painting ``Pallas Athena'' and about 50 of his drawings made between 1895 and 1905. Sept. 30-Dec. 23. Akademiehof, Makartgasse 3, A-1010 Vienna.

Austrian Gallery Belvedere -- The gallery owns more than 30 Klimts. Although works on display may change, at this writing, the 21 Klimts being shown included ``The Kiss,'' ``Adam and Eve,'' ``Water Serpents I (The Friends I),'' and ``Judith.'' From Sept. 9-Nov. 22, the gallery mounts a special exhibit of works by Carl Moll (1861-1945), a member of the Secession and a supporter of young talents like Kokoschka and Schiele. Upper Belvedere, Prinz Eugen-Strasse 27, 1030 Vienna. Lower Belvedere, Rennweg 6, A-1030 Vienna.

Museum for Applied Arts -- In addition to the Stoclet Frieze, fin-de-siecle-minded visitors in 1998 can see the exhibit Beyond Usefulness: Dagobert Peche and the Wiener Werkstatte. Feb. 10-May 17. Stubenring 5, A-1010 Vienna.

Vienna Secession -- In ``A Century of Artistic Expression: 100 Years Vienna Secession,'' a major commemorative exhibit, about 250 works by 100 artists will be displayed. Curator Robert Fleck sets out merely to illustrate the sweep of modern art during the last century, celebrate the Secession's long tradition of innovation and internationalism, reveal emerging commonalities in the art movements of the Secession era and, by the way, highlight significant trends in the 1990s. Whew! Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, of course, is a centerpiece of the show, but also look for works by such contemporaries as Kandinsky, Klee, Matisse, Rodin, Schiele, etc. April 3-June 21. Friedrichstrasse 12, A-1010 Vienna.