Beginning in 1900, Gustav Klimt began to travel to the Salzkammergut region of Austria for the summer months, painting the lush scenery and iridescent waters of Attersee en plein air. Attersee in the summer represented peace and respite away from the busy and public metropolitan life the artist knew in Vienna and so this work epitomizes Klimt at his most private and romantic. He was accompanied to the Attersee by his companion, the Viennese bohemian Emilie Flöge. Klimt became a frequent guest of the Flöge family in Attersee, staying at various locations during his visits. While he completed Insel im Attersee he was likely staying at a guesthouse rented for him by the family in the Brewery at Litzlberg.
In his landscapes from this period Klimt enjoyed an artistic freedom unrestrained by the confines of his commissioned works. His early Attersee paintings epitomize Klimt’s new form of expression and approach to composition, with Insel im Attersee perhaps the most radical and striking example from the group. The painting is characterized by the distinctive “cropping” of the scene, evident in the ways in which the horizon sits unusually high in the image with the upper edge of the island cut out of the frame.
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Emilie Flöge and Gustav Klimt in a rowing boat on Attersee, about 1909/10
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With the water’s surface making up the majority of the composition, Klimt focuses his attention on the interplay of light and color, building layers of textures in glistening blues, yellows, and greens. Rather than a naturalistic portrayal of the reflection on the water, Klimt fully immerses the viewer into the kaleidoscopic effect of the water, which is only further enhanced by the unique composition of the landscape.
This approach is thought to be influenced by the artist’s experiments with photography, a tool he would explore over the course of the next decade, and which would become crucial to his artistic practice. As a founding member of the Vienna Secession, Klimt was influential in bringing works by his French peers to Vienna, and the influence of Impressionism and Pointillism is also noticeable in the work’s defined brushstrokes as well as its square format – a development which was contemporaneous to Monet’s earliest experiments with square canvases for his celebrated Nymphéas paintings. The high horizon and flattening of the surface in Insel im Attersee also have parallels in Japanese art and woodcuts which were popular in Europe at the time, offering an alternative to prevailing Western perspectives and aiding in the breadth of art produced at the time.
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Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge at the boat house in Litzlberg at Attersee, with the island in the background, 1906.
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Galerie St. Etienne and the Legacy of Gustav Klimt
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In 1938 Otto Kallir was forced to leave Austria following the Nazi Anschluss and divided his time between Lucerne, Switzerland (where his wife and children had found refuge) and Paris. In Paris, Kallir opened the Galerie St. Etienne – named in tribute to St. Stephen’s Cathedral that had cast its shadow over his gallery in Vienna, and Insel im Attersee was one of the paintings that Kallir chose to hang in his inaugural French exhibition. World events caught up with the Kallir family again and in September 1939 they relocated to New York, where Otto founded the Galerie St. Etienne on 57th Street – furnished from thrift stores. The gallery’s first shows consisted of works Kallir successfully rescued from Vienna, likely saving them from destruction as the majority of the artists shown at the gallery were considered “degenerate” by the Nazi regime.
Insel im Attersee was one of three paintings by Klimt included in the one of the gallery’s most notable early exhibitions: “Saved from Europe,” held in 1940. This landmark show, which also included nine works by Egon Schiele and six by Alfred Kubin, marked a major milestone in Modernist art history and was critical in the process of promoting these artists at a time where the appetite for French work heavily outweighed the interest in the Austrian masters given the negative stigma and association with Nazi Germany. As with so many revolutionary moments in art history, the press and public did not immediately embrace such “unusual” artwork, with the New York Herald Tribune, commenting in its review of “Saved from Europe” that, “We are not sure that the reception here to the paintings of Schiele and Klimt will be all that may be expected for them. It is difficult to awaken enthusiasm at this point for artists so little known and appreciated here and for many years passed from the contemporary scene in Europe.”
Otto Kallir continued to propel the reputations of these artists throughout the 1940s and ‘50s, hosting Klimt’s very first solo exhibition in the U.S. at Galerie St. Etienne in 1959. Kallir was also instrumental in placing major works by Klimt in leading U.S. museums and institutions, including many that marked the first work by the artist in these respective collections. Most notably, in 1957 Kallir provided The Museum of Modern Art, New York with its first work by the artist, The Park, and also donated Pear Tree to the Fogg Museum at Harvard University in 1956.
Coming to public auction for the first time in history, Insel am Attersee provides a unique window into Klimt’s revolutionary body of work. Later, through the efforts of Otto Kallir, it played a key role in building the artist’s legacy in the United States and was instrumental in earning Klimt the international recognition he enjoys today.
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