2022
In 2022, the Klimt Museum, which was awarded the Austrian Museum Quality Seal, celebrated its 10th anniversary and the 160th birthday of the world artist with the special show "A Summer Like Back Then."
Unique snapshot photographs and personal correspondence as well as other high-carat objects from the collection of the non-profit Klimt Foundation, including original drawings, rare collotype prints or Klimt's studio furniture showed the artist personally and very privately. A construction plan for the Palais Stoclet by Josef Hoffmann or a more than two-meter tall faience figure by Richard Luksch, which was connected to Klimt's artistic elaborations for the Brussels Palais, expanded the show to include his living space Vienna and those renowned large-scale projects that could not rest even during Klimt's summer sojourn.
The anniversary exhibition was complemented by two art interventions by the Upper Austrian artists Bernadette Huber and Hannes Rohringer.
Bernadette Huber (Steyr) thematized in her video work "FLÖGE FLÖGE" the dynamic relationship between Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge and their vacation time together.
At the invitation of the Klimt Foundation, Hannes Rohringer (Seewalchen) designed the imposing rowboat sculpture "Waterlily Gustav" in the Klimt Garden, which is marked by decay and references Klimt's passion for rowing and his poem "The Waterlily" written in 1917.
2020 & 2021
In the past two seasons, the closeness to nature and artistic nature of the painter genius and his contemporaries - from Alfons Mucha, Franz von Zülow to Kolo Moser - was the focus of the special exhibition "Gustav Klimt's floral world". Facsimiles of the most famous landscape paintings by the Art Nouveau master offered detailed insights into Klimt's "floral world" and demonstrated the diversity of his unmistakable, colorful "painting mosaics". In addition, the exhibition highlighted the innovations in floral handicrafts and the role of Austria at the 1900 Paris World Exhibition.
Despite the Covid-19 pandemic and the shortened season, we can look back on a successful time with great events and the granting of the Österreichisches Museumsgütesiegel.
2019
The season started on May 1, 2019 with the multimedia presentation about Gustav Klimt's summer stays at the Attersee. From June 21st, the special exhibition “Floral Worlds - Flourishing Jugendstil” curated by the Klimt Foundation was dedicated to the artist's closeness to nature and the Art Nouveau phenomenon in Vienna around 1900. As an exclusive highlight, the Klimt original painting “Litzlbergkeller” (1915/16) was presented at its place of origin, the Attersee, up to Klimt's 157th birthday on July 14, 2019.
The Virtual Reality Experiment "Klimt's Magic Garden" by Frederick Baker, presented in 2018 on the 100th anniversary of Gustav Klimt's death at the Vienna MAK - Museum of Applied Arts, was available to visitors in the Klimt Center until August 18, 2019 (on weekends).
The region has been honoring the famous artist with the Klimt-Artist-Trail in public space since 2003, while the Gustav Klimt Center was opened in 2012. Since the beginning of summer 2019, this area has offered another outdoor attraction for locals and guests to discover the traces of Gustav Klimt on the Attersee: the world's first Gustav Klimt Garden. Six paintings by the master, created between 1907 and 1916, served as the basis for the design of the approximately 100 square meter large flower beds with water lily basins and rose hedges. The project, conceived by the Klimt Foundation and its regional partners, was nominated and funded by the Federal Ministry for Sustainability and Tourism in 2018 as one of six tourist lighthouse projects in Austria.
2018
Selected facsimiles of Klimt's Attersee landscapes, including the most expensive one on the art market since 2017, presented Klimt's painterly work phases during his stays in Litzlberg, Kammer and Weißenbach. In the graphics cabinet, visitors discovered the world artist primarily as an erotic draftsman; in his designs for the mosaic frieze of the Stoclet Palace, which are permanently installed in the Klimt Center as large-format reproductions, they explored Gustav Klimt's connection to nature. Moreover, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the death of Gustav Klimt and three other artistic personalities from the turn of the century - Egon Schiele, Kolo Moser and Otto Wagner - these pioneers of Viennese Modernism and their connection to the Salzkammergut received a special focus.
The renowned Viennese artist Nives Widauer added a contemporary accent to the exhibition with her video installation “Time Tunnel”. Widauer's installation provides unique insights into the historicist Villa Paulick in Seewalchen am Attersee, which was built in 1877 and became known as a stimulating meeting place for Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge. The artist combines a tracking shot from the bottom of the Attersee, through the boathouse, through the garden and through the rooms of the famous Villa Paulick to her tower and ends with a spectacular view over the roof gable. Mounted in a plate camera from the turn of the century, visitors watch the video as if looking into the interior of a memory room.
2017
During the Gustav Klimt Center’s sixth season, the Klimt Foundation celebrated the Jugendstil artist’s 155th birthday and presented the periods of his painterly oeuvre during his sojourns through select original-size facsimiles of Klimt’s Attersee landscapes, including the most expensive one sold to date, the work “Cottage Garden” created in 1907. Another emphasis was on the 140th anniversary of the erection of the Villa Paulick. The historicist villa in Seewalchen, which to this day is considered a gem of villa architecture on the Attersee, was an influential meeting-place for the artist couple Gustav Klimt & Emilie Flöge. During the summer months, visitors were given the opportunity to explore the now privately owned villa on guided tours with art historians from the Klimt Foundation. This journey of discovery was supplemented with further performances of the play “Süße Wiener Dunkelheit / tiefheller See” at the Villa Paulick.
2016
Emilie Flöge – Reforming Fashion, Inspiring Art
4th June 2016 – 26th Oct. 2016
For its fifth season, the Gustav Klimt Center operated by the Klimt Foundation decided to shine the spotlight for the first time on the woman by the side of the famous holiday guest: the fashion designer Emilie Flöge. The relationship between Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge continues to be the subject of speculation to this day. Precisely 100 years after their last summer sojourn spent together on the Attersee, the exhibition featured exclusive messages and memorabilia from their lives in Vienna and Upper Austria between painter’s frock and reform dress, and for the first time also incorporated contemporary contributions by the artists Bernadette Huber and Irene Andessner. Clara Gallistl’s play “Süße Wiener Dunkelkeit / tiefheller See” commissioned by the Klimt Foundation premiered at the historicist Villa Paulick in Seewalchen as a reading with musical accompaniment.
The book accompanying the special exhibition:
Edition Klimt, vol. 3: Gustav Klimt. Emilie Flöge – Reforming Fashion, Inspiring Art, ed. by Sandra Tretter and Peter Weinhäupl, Christian Brandstätter Verlag, Vienna, 2016, EUR 19.90
Review 2015
“The Visit of the Young Ladies”. Gustav Klimt: Friends I (The Sisters), 1907
27th June 2015 – 2nd Aug. 2015
During the Gustav Klimt Center’s fourth season, the Klimt Foundation presented an unusual oil painting of two ladies from the Foundation’s own collection. An entry in the newspaper Neue Freie Presse dated 7th September 1907 documents the completion of this work during Gustav Klimt’s holidays on the Attersee, and in 2015 the painting finally returned to the place of its creation for the first time in over 100 years. The two elegant ladies “in winter suits” were accompanied by another young lady, Gertrude Flöge, the last family owner of the Villa Paulick, with three of the five original drawings of her known to date presented together for the first time.
The book accompanying the special exhibition:
Edition Klimt, volume 2: Gustav Klimt. Summer Sojourns on the Attersee 1900-1916, ed. by Sandra Tretter and Peter Weinhäupl, Christian Brandstätter Verlag, Vienna, 2015, EUR 19.90
2012-2014
Since its opening in July 2012, the Klimt Center on the Attersee has hosted numerous original artworks. In cooperation with the Vienna Leopold Museum, which was also responsible for the curatorial concepts of the exhibitions shown between 2012 and 2014, two landscapes were returned to the place of their creation – in 2012 the painting “On Lake Attersee” (1900), described by contemporary art critics as “a frame full of lake water”, and two years later the work “The Large Poplar II (Gathering Storm)” (1902/03), characterized by its distinctive “trout spots”. In 2013 yet another icon from the collection of the Leopold Museum was presented on the Attersee – Klimt’s rendering “A Morning by the Pond” created in 1899 in the Salzburg town of Golling, which paved the way for all his later landscapes created in a square format.