Customer Reviews

Gustav Klimt: Landscapes

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Klimt seems to be best known for his figuratives - any study of his work should include his landscapes. A very nice book with good color plates.

It is a pleasure to have access to these beautiful works, which are more frequently overshadowed by the attention given to images of people and mythic figures for which Klimt is best known. These landscapes are revealing of both the subject matter and of Klimt the artist as he probed the composition and colors of the places that intrigued him.

Klimt has always been a problematic artist. In contemporary terms, he was a sell-out, but that hardly addresses the situation of a man good with the brushes a hundred years ago trying to make a bit more than a decent living for himself. That was the Nouveau years. The panels and friezes and commissions, the society portraits, the weird freaky paintings with all the gold paint. The man had great talent, and there's that reason that to this day you can buy prints and posters and postcards of his most famous paintings. I happen to own a "Die Kusse" night-light.

It is terribly refreshing to own a volume dedicated to the man's landscapes. For the most part, these were paintings Klimt did for himself while vacationing with his friends in the summer months. They were not meant for sale. Often they were done in an audacious--for the time--square format. A few of the canvases are pretty tedious. But a great number are inspiring and terribly original. It's great to see the lot collected, and well-worth the look, not to mention purchase.

This is a beautifully done book that focuses on the nearly 60 landscape paintings that Austrian painter Gustav Klimt produced, mainly while at leisure and away from Vienna. The 281-page book (paperback--roughly 10"X8") is extremely well-illustrated with photographs, drawings and a wide range of paintings by Klimt and others that he admired or was influenced by. These illustrations are in somewhat small format (the book is smallish), but the quality of the reproductions is first-rate.

The book also includes excellent text on Klimt's career, the secession movement and detailed descriptions of many individual paintings, particularly all of the landscapes that are the centerpieces of the work. At the end of the book, there is a career chronology for Klimt which reminds the reader that the artist died a comparatively young man at age fifty-six, in 1918.

While many of these landscapes are distinctively the work of the artist who produced the elaborate and lush portraits that made him so successful in fin-de-siecle Vienna, they are also something a bit different than the portraits. Unlike the decorative portraits, these paintings--often in unusual square format--did not follow elaborate preparatory drawing. The directness of the connection between Klimt and the natural subjects comes across clearly. Several of these gorgeous paintings--Attersee, Tall Poplars, A Morning by the Pond--go off in completely different directions and could be the works a number of post-impressionists, including Edvard Munch.

One of the best known of Klimt's landscapes, Church in Cassone--Landscape with Cypresses (well-illustrated and discussed in this book), was sold last month by Sotheby's for over $100 million.

This is a wonderful book that should be in any art library.

I love the landscapes of Gustav Klimt and this book has wonderful photos and details of his paintings. i would have liked a little more of a biography of the artist.