Tate Liverpool's new exhibition on the work of Gustav Klimt brings us beyond the headlines and closer to the context within which this art was created, writes Aidan Dunne.
THE FIRST thing to be said about Tate Liverpool's Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life is that the title is something of a misnomer. By rights, this jewel in Liverpool's crown as European Capital of Culture 2008 should be called Klimt, Hoffmann, Moser or maybe Klimt in Context, because the context looms large and anyone expecting a Klimt blockbuster is going to be disappointed.
His better known works are sparsely represented and the show's centerpiece, The Beethoven Frieze is something of a curiosity, albeit a fascinating curiosity. Once you stop looking for the Klimt extravaganza that isn't there, however, you realise that co-curators Christoph Grunenberg and Tobias G Natter have put together a terrific exhibition, one that is hugely detailed, informative and richly textured, with some surprising highlights.
Natter puts his cards on the table at the very beginning of his catalogue text. From the outset, he writes, he wanted to note the links between the ethos of the British Arts and Crafts Movement and Vienna circa 1900, where there was a momentum towards developing the Wagnerian concept of the complete artwork, or Gesamtkunstwerk, in a form encompassing elements of painting, architecture and applied art.
This is largely what the Liverpool exhibition is about, and quite convincingly so. What is surprising, Natter says, is the dearth of historical work on the subject. The three sister arts continue to be "individually well-explored", but rarely studied in concert.
Given Klimt's proclivities as a decorator in love with pattern, glitter and the endless profusion of detail, it's not hard to link him to the philosophy of the integrated artwork. He was a founder and president of the Viennese Succession in 1897, inspired by the German model and marking the inauguration of modernism in a local context.
The Succession's eighth exhibition, Natter points out, was devoted to the applied arts in Europe and featured Charles Rennie Mackintosh "and the other members of the Glasgow Four", together with related British artist-designers. When it comes to linking Klimt to the establishment of the Wiener Werkstätte, the Viennese Workshops, a cooperative society of artist-craftsmen with Gesamtkunstwerk-inspired ideals, Natter is on less sure ground, candidly observing that the level of his involvement is unknown.
What is sure is that two close friends of his, architect Joseph Hoffmann and designer Kolomon Moser, as well as financier Fritz Waerndorfer, founded the workshops. Hoffmann was a formidable talent who believed - quite rightly, surely - that superior design should be evident in every aspect of our lives, and he seems to have been able to turn his hand to designing anything, from large-scale buildings to carpets to furniture to cutlery. He features prominently in the Liverpool exhibition, to the extent that his role is easily as important as the nominal subject, Klimt, and, in a similar way, Moser is also central. Natter argues that Klimt's artistic priorities were so closely in accord with their thinking that he can logically be grouped with them.
There are several superb architectural models of Hoffmann's buildings on view, but one of the show's more unexpected highlights is a straightforward wooden cabinet designed by him for the fashion salon owned by the Flöge sisters in 1904. Made with white-painted panels framed by ebonised wood trim, it is a beautiful piece of work, conforming to a spare, classical aesthetic and, despite the wear and scuff marks of time, looks incredibly fresh and contemporary. It's a sensation that one experiences recurrently throughout the exhibition, on encountering the tea and coffee service Hoffmann designed for Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein, for example, or the intricate cabinet-work in the guest room of Moser's own home or, and this really is surprising, Klimt's pencil drawings.
Surely Klimt's penchant for swooning sensuality with all the Art Noveau trimmings, his Byzantine-inspired love for gold, gold and then some more gold, has long dated and is now viewed as retro-charming? In many respects it has and is, though fans of ornament and extravagance will never tire of his fantastically elaborated portraits of society women, a prime example of which is included in the show.
His painting of Eugenia Primavesi has her characteristically enmeshed in a jungle of coloured ornamentation, her dress a dolly mixture of vibrant reds, blues and violets against a busy background dominated by golden yellow. She doesn't look too happy, is even a little apprehensive, but there's no question but that, against all the odds, Klimt manages to pile on the sugar without over-sweetening the picture: it's a really fine painting.
The Beethoven Frieze, a work that was painted on panels as a temporary installation and nearly came to grief subsequently, before being preserved and laboriously restored, is well worth seeing in all its mannered strangeness. Its three panels symbolically and idiosyncratically enact Wagner's narrative interpretation of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as a human quest for joy, achieved in Gesamtkunstwerk form.
Among Klimt's singular inventions are a huge comic-book gorilla. Some of the female figures apparently caused controversy, though it should be said that, given the explicit nature of a great deal of his work, Klimt didn't have that much trouble in terms of censorship and legal sanctions. It is striking, though, that while the women depicted in the frieze are stylised, they are also rendered with a degree of accuracy and candour that edges them from nude to naked, which may have disturbed some viewers.
Klimt seems so at home indoors, in the realm of the studio, that he is an unlikely landscape painter, but a very good one. The show features a room of his landscape work and it's one of the best and most cohesive displays on view.
AS WITH HIS PORTRAITS, the landscape motif is always in danger, in his paintings, of being completely overwhelmed by a sheer mass of incidental detail. The Park from 1909-10 features a stand of trees. We know they are trees from the row of trunks that occupy the bottom of the composition. Thereafter, as our eyes move upwards, we are lost in a seething, always engaging surface made up of a myriad of individual marks, to the extent that the picture constantly verges on shaking off its nominal subject matter and becoming an all-over abstract composition.
At the conclusion of the exhibition, a small room with subdued lighting is given over to the artist's mostly erotic pencil drawings. They have earned a certain notoriety, having led to his denunciation as a pornographer, presumably because of the auto-erotic subject matter of many of them.
They will not be to everyone's taste for that and other reasons, but they are brilliant and beautiful drawings (Klimt: Drawings and Watercolours, by Rainer Metzger, Thames and Hudson, features several hundred of them), and their inclusion is warranted because sensuality and eroticism were clearly central to all of Klimt's work and, indeed, his world.
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Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life is at Tate Liverpool, Albert Dock, Liverpool until Aug 31, admission £8 (Concessions £6)