Wiener Werkstätte

Monkey Lamp

1920

After Gustav Klimt, Max Eisler #26, Bauerngarten mit Hühnern; multi-color collotype after 1916 painting in oil on canvas. The original was destroyed by fire in May 1945 at Immendorf Castle, Lower Austria. Landscapes, for Klimt, are vehicles to convey universal themes such as procreation and the mysteries of life. Using a highly personal language of symbols, Klimt creates a voluptuous scene of fertility, fecundity and domesticity. Klimt uses a similarly lustrous palette of pearly iridescence for the path as he had for many of his female nudes. This feminine quality is intensified by the tunnel-effect produced by the walls of colorful floral blooms whose leafy stalks are redolent with wild abundance at the height of summer.The passage leads to a green covered arbor, womb-like, which contains a simple wooden table and a bench. Human presence is unmistakeable.The two chickens shown in the path provide the link to engage with this scene cerebrally and emotionally. Protective and maternal, the mother hens do somewhat bar one’s path, but by no means in a menacing way. The experiential aspect of walking forward and ignoring those chickens, certain that they will dodge out of the way, heightens the rational with the intuitive senses creating the illusion and feeling that the flanking floral walls are parting to provide clear passage to within. Seen in this context, the age old conundrum to divine what came first, the chicken or the egg, begs the question of the greatest mystery of all. One’s relationship to procreation itself, Klimt shows us, is interwoven all around us. Far from banal, this universal quality of the natural world is fraught with thrilling wonder. GUSTAV KLIMT EINE NACHLESE (GUSTAV KLIMT AN AFTERMATH), a portfolio of 30 collotypes prints, 15 are multi-color and 15 are monochrome, on chine colle paper laid down on heavy cream-wove paper with deckled edges; Max Eisler, Editor-Publisher; Osterreichischer Staatsdruckerei (Austrian State Printing Office), Printer; in a limited edition of 500 numbered examples of which: 200 were printed in German, 150 were printed in French and 150 were printed in English; Vienna, 1931. 2018 marks the 100th anniversary of Gustav Klimt’s death. It is a fitting time to reflect upon the enduring legacy and deep impact of his art. Recognizing this need for posterity with uncanny foresight, the publication of Gustav Klimt: An Aftermath (Eine Nachlese) provides a rare collection of work after Klimt which has proven to be an indispensable tool for Klimt scholarship as well as a source for pure visual delight. Approximately 25 percent of the original works featured in the Aftermath portfolio have since been lost. Of those 30, six were destroyed by fire on 8 May 1945. On that fateful final day of WWII, the retreating Feldherrnhalle, a tank division of the German Army, set fire to the Schloss Immendorf which was a 16th century castle in Lower Austria used between 1942-1945 to store objects of art. All three of Klimt’s Faculty Paintings: Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence (1900-1907), originally created for the University of Vienna, were on premises at that time. Also among the inventory of Klimt paintings in storage there was art which had been confiscated by the Nazis. One of the most significant confiscated collections was the Lederer collection which featured many works by Gustav Klimt such as Girlfriends II and Garden Path with Chickens...

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