Gustav Klimt

Broncia Koller-Pinell and Dr. Hugo Koller, Vienna and Oberwaltersdorf (acquired by 1928) 

Rupert Koller and Silvia Koller, Vienna (acquired by descent from the above by 1949) 

Kunsthandlung Franz Schebesta's Erben, Vienna 

Private Collection, Vienna 

Serge Sabarsky Gallery, New York (acquired by 1983)

Acquired from the above in December 1985 by the present owner

(probably) Venice, Giardini di Castello, IX Esposizione internazionale d’arte della città di Venezia, 1910, no. 20, p. 60 (titled Prato fiorito)

(probably) Vienna, Galerie Miethke, Gustav Klimt, 1910, no. 3 (titled Blumenwiese)

Vienna, XCIX. Ausstellung der Vereinigung bildender Künstler Wiener Secession. Klimt-Gedächtnis-Ausstellung, 1928, no. 9, p. 11 (titled Blumige Wiese)

Vienna, Österreichische Galerie, 1933-34 (on loan; titled Landschaft)

New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Vienna 1900: Art, Architecture & Design, 1986, p. 161; p. 194, illustrated in color (titled Garden Landscape (Blooming Meadow) and dated circa 1906)

Kunsthaus Zürich, Gustav Klimt, 1862-1918, 1992, no. G 35, pp. 140 and 368; p. 141, illustrated in color (titled Gartenlandschaft (Blühende Wiese) and dated 1904-05)

Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, Gustav Klimt: Modernism in the Making, 2001, no. 22, p. 112, illustrated in color; p. 113 (titled Garden Landscape (Blooming Meadow) and dated circa 1906)

Vienna, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, and Williamstown, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Gustav Klimt Landscapes, 2002-03, pl. 27, pp. 65, 167, 202 and 216; p. 88, illustrated in color (titled Gartenlandschaft (Blühende Wiese) and dated circa 1905-06)

Fritz Novotny and Johannes Dobai, Gustav Klimt, with a Catalogue Raisonné of his Paintings, Boston, 1968, no. 148, pl. 60, illustrated; p. 340, illustrated (titled Gartenlandschaft and dated circa 1906)

Christian M. Nebehay, ed., Gustav Klimt: Dokumentation, Vienna, 1969, p. 519 (titled Gartenlandschaft (blühende Wiese))

Johannes Dobai, L’opera completa di Klimt, Milan, 1978, no. 135, p. 102, illustrated; p. 103 (titled Prato Fiorito)

Johannes Dobai, “Die Landschaft aus der Sicht von Gustav Klimt. Ein Essay,” Klimt-Studien, Mitteilungen der Österreichischen Galerie, vol. 22-23, no. 66-67, 1978-79, p. 260 

Johannes Dobai, Gustav Klimt Landscapes, London, 1988, fig. 35, illustrated; pp. 21, 33 and 84; p. 24, illustrated; pl. 25, p. 85, illustrated in color (titled Meadow of Flowers and dated 1906)

Alfred Weidinger, Neues zu den Landschaften Gustav Klimts, Dissertation, Universität Salzburg, 1992, no. 122; p. 105; n.p., illustrated (titled Blühende Wiese)

Gerbert Frodl, Klimt, London, 1992, no. 3, p. 154, illustrated (titled Meadow in Flower and dated 1906)

Wolfgang Georg Fischer, Monika Oberhammer, and Susanna Partsch, et al., Gegenwelten, Gustav Klimt--Künstlerleben im Fin de Siècle, Munich, 1996, p. 97 (titled Gartenlandschaft)

Gottfried Fliedl, Gustav Klimt 1862-1918: The World in Female Form, Cologne, 1998, p. 180, illustrated in color (titled Gartenlandschaft (Blühende Wiese) and dated 1906)

Alfred Weidinger, ed., Gustav Klimt, Munich, London and New York, 2007, pl. 176, pp. 151 and 157; p. 282, illustrated in color (dated 1904-05)

Tobias G. Natter, ed., Gustav Klimt, The Complete Paintings, Cologne, 2012, no. 166, pp. 278 and 286; p. 287, illustrated in color (detail); pp. 310 and 598, illustrated in color (titled Flowering Meadow and dated circa 1904-05)

Tobias G. Natter and Elisabeth Leopold, eds., Gustav Klimt, Die Sammlung im Leopold Museum, Vienna, 2013, p. 33, illustrated in color; p. 35 (dated 1904-05) 

Sandra Tretter and Peter Weinhäupl, eds., Gustav Klimt. Summer Sojourns on the Attersee 1900-1916, Vienna, 2015, no. 19, p. 102; p. 103, illustrated in color (titled Flowering Meadow and dated circa 1904-05)

Tobias G. Natter, ed., Gustav Klimt: Sämtliche Gemälde, Vienna, 2017, no. 166, p. 278; p. 302, illustrated in color; pp. 542, illustrated in color (dated circa 1904-05)

Exh. Cat., Vienna, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Broncia Koller-Pinell: Eine Künstlerin und ihr Netzwerk, 2024, fig. 10, p. 31, illustrated in color; pp. 35 (note 24) and 198

Painted likely in the summer of 1908, Gustav Klimt’s Blooming Meadow constitutes a more liberated and daring view of a colorful flowering garden than any of the artist’s earlier landscapes devoted to the subject. As the florescence of viola, green, yellow, and white daubs spreads before the viewer, the yellow blooms intensify in an oval-shape just below a thicket of green, and thickly painted white clouds float on a ribbon of brilliant blue. By comparison, the tree foliage might appear simply a deep, saturated green, until the yellow daubs (possibly still-ripening fruit) emerge amidst the deftly applied, slightly longer strokes of violets and bluish grays. The eye could easily lose its bearings in this flat, kaleidoscopic carpet of hues; indeed, some of Klimt’s critics thought his landscapes to be the work of a madman, so radical were their compositions. But even with the heightened degree of abstraction, the pictorial effusion captures the wildflowers native to the lake Attersee region: bellflowers, buttercups, clover, cornflowers, daisies, and dandelions, all blossoming simultaneously during the peak season. Such flowering meadows still abound in the region (see fig. 1), and with time, Klimt’s contemporaries came to regard his renderings as a set of “new eyes” through which to look at nature.

The composition is devoid of human presence—with the exception of a path created by ever-so-subtle distinctions in the brushwork, originating at the bottom left, moving past the ambiguous form (be it foliage or shadow) at bottom center, and onward to the trees at mid-distance. Could it have been Klimt who passed through in search of the right angle? Depending on the height of the wildflowers, even a single walk could have left their stalks visibly bent. If he did, the artist chose the middle of the day, when the sun stood highest and when he liked to take a break from his morning’s work. His books on Japanese art may have been to hand for inspiration. He studied them out in the open and sometimes ahead of his summer work as a way to ease himself into the vacation, as he described in a letter sent during one of his earlier sojourns in the region.

There are only four landscapes known from the two years immediately prior to when Klimt executed Blooming Meadow, as he was consumed by his commission for the Palais Stoclet in Brussels (see figs. 2-5). He selected three of them—Bauerngarten mit Sonnenblumen (1906), Blühender Mohn (1907), and Die Sonnenblume (1907/08) (all Belvedere, Vienna)—for the much-anticipated Kunstschau, an exhibition at the forefront of the Austrian modernist movement, held in Vienna between June and November of 1908 and organized by the so-called “Klimt group” (see fig. 6).

In Blooming Meadow, the artist built upon the subject and theme of Blühender Mohn but with a brighter palette and heightened appreciation for pointillism’s innovative possibilities. The painting’s sea of flowers is subsumed by waves of lush and loose stippling, a no less real but much more radical depiction than the individualized petals and stems visible in the foreground of the red poppy field or the close-up sunflowers in the aforementioned garden pictures. While Klimt’s landscapes in the following years, such as those depicting the moated Castle Kammer or Obstgarten mit Rosen (1912; Private Collection) likewise depend upon cropped fields of vision, their compositions and overall paint handling are no longer as radically abstracted. Instead, one finds visual anchors in the form of alleys, buildings, garden paths, and contoured vegetal shapes rather than the poetic trance of flat planes and colors conjured in the breakthrough Blooming Meadow.

These earlier landscapes also depicted a different location. The year 1908 marked a change in where Klimt spent his Sommerfrische (summer vacation) on the Attersee: from that summer onward, together with Emilie Flöge, Klimt no longer stayed at the guesthouse of the Litzlberg Brewery, instead renting the Villa Oleander of Hôtel Seehof in Kammerl along the lake’s northern-most tip (see figs. 7-8). Villa Oleander included a garden and an adjacent meadow, which would have been covered in an abundance of wildflowers by the time Klimt arrived, typically around his birthday on July 14th (indeed, one of his letters from Kammerl that year is post-stamped July 16th). Villa Paulick, the Flöge family’s waterfront property in Seewalchen, was but a short distance away, which meant that visits at one or the other house were easily accomplished and often undertaken, as recorded in countless photographs of the time. Like Villa Oleander, the house counted a meadow among its surroundings. It is unknown from which of the two locations exactly the artist took inspiration for Blooming Meadow, which until recently was erroneously dated much earlier and thus, not associated with either.

As Stephan Koja asserts, “Klimt’s custom [was] not to move very far away from his holiday home when painting—often only a few steps and rarely more than 100 meters…He hardly ever added or omitted anything but reproduced what he saw with great accuracy and in surprising detail” (Belvedere Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, special edition Klimt, 2006, p. 310). Historic and contemporary photographs of Villa Paulick suggest that Klimt might have chosen a view from the nearby boat house, with his back turned toward the lake and looking up the hill on which the house stood, and where trees not unlike those in Klimt’s painting had been planted. His perspective might also have been from further up the slope, overlooking the fields behind the house (see fig. 9). Such foreshortened vantage points explain the composition’s stark planarity and high horizon line; they may also account for the mysterious, green foliate form that appears cropped in the immediate foreground, be it a shadow or a Laurel daphne shrub, a variety still common in the region today.

Site specificity and botany aside, Klimt took his pictorial liberties. In letters to his mistress Marie “Mizzi” Zimmermann, the painter described how he would take his books on Japanese art outdoors to study the flattened perspectives of their landscapes in broad daylight. But the tilted and cropped view he adopted in Blooming Meadow also speaks to the influence of Claude Monet, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, and other Impressionists and Post-Impressionists (see fig. 10). Like Klimt, many of these artists had been enthralled by East Asian art, and their work had come on display in Vienna alongside Japanese painting and woodblock prints in a groundbreaking 1903 survey organized by the Secession, the renegade group which Klimt co-founded. In early 1906, Galerie H. O. Miethke (which also represented Klimt) hosted the first retrospective of van Gogh’s work in Vienna, which contained over forty paintings—some, like Garden with Flowers (1888; Private Collection) (see fig. 12), proved prophetic of Klimt’s foreshortened point of view and animated technique, made of thick rather than fine points of pigment. Others like Sunny Lawn in Public Park (1888; Private Collection, Switzerland; see fig. 11) exploited the high horizon line van Gogh had gleaned from Japanese prints, which Viennese circles hailed as “new artistic territory.” Photography was another field that Klimt paid close attention to during the period between 1897 and 1916, when he produced the majority of his landscapes. It was a time that saw breakthroughs in the medium by such pioneers as the pictorialist Heinrich Kuehn, who had accompanied Klimt on his travels across Italy in 1899 (see fig. 13). Cropping, blurring, angled views and the collapsing of space between near and far—the camera too provided a more subjective, lyrical way of representing the experience of nature.

Klimt’s landscapes, as Stephan Koja concludes, “lead us to the very core of his art. Our eyes are directed at the essentials, the purely artistic, unobstructed by theme or content” (Stephen Koja, Gustav Klimt: Landscapes, New York, 2002, p. 9). It is no surprise, then, that the first owner of Blooming Meadow was a fellow artist, the Austro-Galician, Jewish painter Broncia Koller-Pinell. She had purchased the painting with her husband, the physicist, industrialist, and bibliophile, Dr. Hugo Koller, at least by 1928—if not when it was first exhibited in Vienna in 1910 at Miethke gallery. The couple lived in Vienna and a country estate in nearby Oberwaltersdorf. Active patrons of the arts, they commissioned Josef Hoffmann to remodel their residencies and fit them with furniture designed by him and artist Koloman Moser. Koller-Pinell’s father had moved his family to the empire’s capital in 1873, and it was there and in Munich that his daughter attended her initial art lessons beginning in 1881. From 1890 onward, Koller-Pinell emerged as a young talent whose work was discussed in art journals such as Die Kunst für Alle and the Wiener Fremdenblatt and included in national and international exhibitions. It was the important 1908 Kunstschau exhibition, however, that transformed her career as an artist. Six of her paintings were shown alongside those by Klimt and his splinter faction, which, in 1905, had seceded from the Secession group. The organizer nonetheless refused to accept her submission of Seated Nude (Marietta) (1907, Eisenberger Collection, Vienna) (see fig. 14). Only few women artists, such as Koller-Pinell’s contemporary Paula Modersohn-Becker, had begun to reimagine the subject of the female nude through a woman’s eyes, daring to measure themselves against their male counterparts.

But Klimt was not lacking in admiration for another artist’s capabilities: he and Koller-Pinell shared a professional relationship, one that was especially close during the years in which Koller-Pinell saw her breakthrough successes, between 1908 and 1911. Aside from her participation in the 1908 Kunstschau exhibition, she formed part of the 1909 international reiteration and enjoyed her first solo exhibition at Galerie H. O. Miethke in 1911. At the same time, Koller-Pinell explored the period’s interest in Japanese woodblock prints, photography, design, and fashion. She also looked to Klimt’s work, as evident in her Blumengarten (Kunsthandlung Julius Hummel, Vienna), circa 1907, a small square-format painting reminiscent of the flowering landscapes Klimt produced that year.

The Kollers lent Blooming Meadow, the sole Klimt landscape known to have been singularly titled “Blumige Wiese,” to the 1928 Klimt memorial exhibition organized by the Vienna Secession (see fig. 17). That show also included the Koller family’s only other Klimt painting: the 1917/18 Lady in White (see fig. 15), which the Belvedere, Vienna acquired in 1948 together with Egon Schiele’s Portrait of Dr. Hugo Koller from 1918 (see fig. 16). Both paintings had been in the family’s possession until after the Second World War—the Klimt landscape, on the other hand, entered the private art market in Vienna the following decade. If the Kollers’ history as Klimt collectors has been absent from Klimt scholarship until recently, it is because the traces they left are few and far between. Their contribution to the acquisition of the university panel Medicine (1900–1907; destroyed by fire at Schloss Immendorf in 1945) for the Moderne Galerie of the Belvedere (together with the Lederers, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, and Sonja Knips in 1919), however, attests to the fact that their circles and those of Klimt’s most important patrons not only overlapped, but that they agreed on supporting the artist’s legacy.

Upon Koller-Pinell’s death in April 1934, her possessions by law passed onto her husband and, when he died in October 1949, to their children. Despite the latter’s status as half Jewish under the Nuremberg Race Laws, the Christian-baptized Rupert and Silvia (their mother had converted to Catholicism at the time of her marriage to their father) survived the Second World War in Oberwaltersdorf with their father without incident. Like other artwork in the Koller collection, such as the Klimt portrait, Schiele’s Single Houses, and Carl Hofer’s portrait of Koller-Pinell (circa 1921-22; Belvedere, Vienna), it is reasonable to believe that their Klimt landscape was also brought from Vienna to Oberwaltersdorf for safekeeping.

For the aforementioned 1908 Kunstschau, Klimt included three of his portraits, six landscapes, five allegorical paintings with female protagonists, and two pictures depicting fashionable but unidentified women models. He mixed the genres in his installation: for example, Blühender Mohn and Rosen unter Bäumen (circa 1904; Private Collection) flanked the portrait of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein (1905; Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Neue Pinakothek, Munich) (see fig. 6). In 1985, when Leonard A. Lauder acquired Blooming Meadow together with the portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, he likely intuited the connection that Klimt himself saw between his landscapes and his figurative works. If, as Stephan Koja has argued, it was “Klimt’s conviction that woman was a noble specimen, a precious product of nature,” then nature itself, and fields of wildflowers in particular, became just as prized by the artist and his collectors as were his portraits (ibid., p. 31). Only much later did Lauder discover that the original owner of Blooming Meadow was also a woman, the only patron of Klimt’s to be a painter in her own right, and whose career flowered in the years before the First World War.

Luise Mahler is Adjunct Associate Professor, Art Market Studies, School of Graduate Studies, FIT, SUNY and Research Associate of the Leonard A. Lauder Collection