Footsteps: Seeing Like Klimt on an Austrian Lake

Written By Unknown on Jumat, 05 Juli 2013 | 17.35

Imagno/Getty Images; Josef Polleross for The New York Times; Leopold Museum, Vienna

Clockwise from top left: Gustav Klimt; Lake Attersee; "On Lake Attersee," a painting by Klimt.

The Viennese painter Gustav Klimt first visited the stunning turquoise waters of Lake Attersee, in northern Austria, as a young man in search of a summer refuge.

"It is terrible, awful here in Vienna," Klimt wrote to a friend. "Everything parched, hot, dreadful, all this work on top of it, the 'bustle' — I long to be gone like never before."

The leader of Austria's turn-of-the-century modern art movement and Vienna's most famous painter was helping to support two lovers, two children, his mother and two unwed sisters. His need for escape should come as no surprise: fond of sketching naked models in his studio, he was facing accusations of pornography even as wealthy matrons were lining up to have him paint their portraits.

At the age of 38, Klimt journeyed to the Salzkammergut region and made his way to a stone-and-turreted villa at the northern tip of Lake Attersee, at the edge of the Austrian Alps. There, he shed city clothing for floor-length robes, temporarily abandoned his city mistresses and traded stylized portrait painting for the bracing, vivid landscapes of his summer idyll.

Klimt had found his sommerfrische — literally, "summer fresh" — the extended sojourn into this lake-dotted countryside that began as a tradition with the 19th-century Hapsburg emperors and is still beloved by Austrians. He returned to Lake Attersee for 15 more summers until his death in 1918, creating more than 45 of his 50 landscapes in the tiny lakefront towns of Seewalchen, Litzlberg and Weissenbach.

"Anyone who wants to know anything about me as an artist — and this is the only thing that matters," Klimt famously told a journalist, "should look attentively at my pictures and try to discern from them who I am and what I want."

To even attempt to know the man behind Klimt's masterpieces, one must first go to Vienna. And then one must visit the Attersee, which retains the same open-air charm that drew royalty and artists here more than a century ago.

After a steaming week in Vienna researching Klimt's life and work for a novel — and finding the city as hot and demanding as Klimt did — my husband and I followed his footsteps and drove two and a half hours west, slipping into a low-key, lush countryside where extended families vacation in simple lake houses, cyclists spin through the valley on long treks and weekend sailors ply the lake waters.

We settled into a room with a sweeping water view at the Hotel-Restaurant Häupl and then headed out to follow some of Klimt's routine, rowing in an old-fashioned wooden boat for hours, diving from a silvered wooden dock into bracing water, dining on whole fish cooked on a long stick over open coals and hiking on lush hillsides.

The new Gustav Klimt Center, perched at the lake's edge, was our base of operations. The museum's opening last July, timed to mark the 150th anniversary of Klimt's birth, coincides with a renewed interest in his pastoral paintings. For decades his iconic gold- and silver-accented works, "Adele Bloch-Bauer I" and "The Kiss," eclipsed his innovative landscapes. But in 2011 his colorful "Litzlberg on Attersee" was auctioned at Sotheby's for $40.4 million, and last year the Leopold Museum in Vienna mounted a retrospective that gave equal weight to his landscapes. The new museum at the lake beautifully and intimately highlights Klimt's connection to the lake and its surroundings.

"The story here is that you can see all of Klimt's motifs," said Sandra Tretter, a curator at the center and at the Leopold. "For 27 of his landscape paintings you can stand where he stood and see the view, see what he left out and what he included."

The center, modestly tucked between the gated Schloss Kammer castle and the local marina, also offers a multimedia history of the painter's summer life, and a self-guided walking audio tour along the Gustav Klimt Theme Trail, which turns the towns of Seewalchen, Kammer and Schörfling into an open-air extension of the museum. The tour led us to colorful kiosks along the water where we were treated to a recap of the artist's career highlights, after which we climbed aboard a small motorized skiff with a local guide for a private tour we had arranged through the Attersee tourism office.

The lake water was a brilliant, almost unreal blue and the breeze was making a brisk headwind as we left the shore, eyes peeled for the highlights of the landscape Klimt immortalized in his work.


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