The Klimt Society’s Third Presentation of the artist’s studio, shown at Klimt Villa 2005 to 2007, included eleven informative exhibition panels, in German and English, with photos, documents and images of Klimt’s work, studios and life-style. Click on the highlighted heading to view:

  Studios and Homes

Homes

Studios

About Klimt's Studio at Feldmühlgasse, an Expert Recommendation, written 2012:

During the final weeks before the official opening of Klimt Villa in 2012 Klimt Society received a visit from Roger Bevan, UK Correspondent, THE ART NEWSPAPER. He led three groups of art experts and collectors from Britain to Vienna, on his program "Exhibition Circle Abroad", for the Gustav Klimt 150^th Birthday Anniversary exhibitions in the Vienna museums. They came to see the empty rooms and received special permission to inspect the Villa, still then under restoration. Roger Bevan's review "Klimt's studio opens its doors", The Art Newspaper, October 2012 is testimony to the Society's service to cultural heritage at the European level. Written by an expert outside Austria - he is an ideal person to evaluate and comment on what has been achieved:

… KLIMT VILLA STUDIO

Thank you for giving me an opportunity to review the admirable restoration progress which you have been making at the Klimt Villa Studio. I am delighted to see those legendary rooms where the great artist painted the masterpieces from the later chapter of his career (1912-1918) coming to look so promising …

… the shocking truth is that virtually no studios of the great European painters of the 19th or 20th Centuries survive completely intact. Lord Leighton's magnificent property in London is a rare exception. Cézanne's Aix-en-Provence studio might be the model for your endeavours since it does not house any original pictures but still manages to convey the atmosphere of this great master (with, admittedly, the still-life accessories of the ginger jar and the skulls remaining). The same remarks apply to Monet's Giverny. Giorgio Morandi's studio has been reconstructed in a museum in Bologna and Francis Bacon's London mews house in a museum in Dublin. Dalí's fishing cottages survive in Port Lligat but the original pictures have been stripped out (too valuable) and replaced by scale photographic copies (an acceptable decision). Miró's Palma di Majorca studio survives and has been expanded into a museum of his art.

For sculpture, it's a slightly different story with bronze casts of editioned works of art being available for Rodin's hotel in Paris and Henry Moore's foundation at Much Hadham. Brancusi's studio has been reconstructed under the umbrella of Centre Georges Pompidou.

All the rest are gone: Seurat, Signac, van Gogh (the Yellow House damaged 1944 and subsequently demolished), Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Giacometti, Beckmann, all Klimt's contemporaries exist as museum or art market personalities but without the touchstone of the place where the pictures were painted. Klimt is a very rare and very precious situation where real estate developments have, extraordinarily, incorporated, rather than destroyed, the property to which the legendary clients made their journey and from which the painted portraits, the allegories and the landscapes were dispatched to exhibitions or collections.

Were resources available, the additional rooms of the villa-studio would make a superb Klimt study centre for international research. One senses that there is still much work to be completed before we understand his career as fully as Picasso or Matisse, his only rivals to greatness. I send my very best wishes for your continuing efforts in the field of Klimt studies of which the villa-studio is such a critical component.

Roger Bevan

Contemporary Art Correspondent

The Art Newspaper

More here:

www.klimtvilla.at