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The Viennese summer of 1908, the 60th anniversary of Kaiser Franz Joseph’s ascendancy to the throne, was a hot one. Crowds thronged the streets to watch sumptuous parades celebrating the history and peoples of an empire stretching from the Swiss to the Russian borders.
Gustav Klimt and fellow artists were not invited to take part in the imperial festivities. Frustrated at a general lack of opportunity to exhibit in Vienna, they seized on the anniversary as an excuse for a huge show. They won temporary use of an area of wasteland that was to become the site of a new concert hall.
That exhibition, the Kunstschau 1908, sprawled over 54 rooms and 6,500 square meters. It is also where Austria’s culture ministry bought Klimt’s “Kiss”. To mark the centenary of the show – and of a shrewd government acquisition (especially compared with the current fad for buying toxic bank debt) – Vienna’s Belvedere has recreated some of the rooms and combined artworks from the show with photos, plans and film footage.
The Belvedere didn’t go to the vast expense of reconstructing Josef Hoffmann’s hastily assembled wooden exhibition area with its courtyards, gardens, theater, cafe and even a cemetery. Klimt and Hoffmann aimed to present a “Gesamtkunstwerk”, or synthesis of art, with ceramics, sculpture, posters, textiles, glassware and even toys as well as paintings, drawings and woodcuts. (Bloomberg)
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