Art News

On Gustav Klimt’s 150th birthday, Vienna’s Belvedere marks 2012 as the Klimt Year

VIENNA.- Owning the largest collection of paintings by Gustav Klimt worldwide, the Belvedere is preparing a very special presentation for this anniversary year. The show Masterpieces in Focus: 150 Years of Gustav Klimt on the Upper Belvedere’s piano nobile will display all of the artist’s paintings preserved in the museum in an extraordinary fashion. Unlike most exhibitions of recent years, it will not deal with stylistic relationships or art historical contexts, but will concentrate on the individual works as such – on the message each of these masterpieces conveys to the spectator. This anniversary practically invites us to look at each single year, even beyond Klimt’s lifetime. A further focus of the exhibition will thus be on the hitherto neglected history of the reception of Klimt’s work and personality. Over these 150 years, Klimt has become a phenomenon not only in art theory, but also in conte