Washington: Google Doodle celebrates 150th birthday of Austrian symbolist painter’s Gustav Klimt.
Besides Google, Vienna’s Leopold Museum’s exhibit features 400 letters the artist sent to long-time friend Emilie Flöge over the course of his life.
“I wanted to send you a funny card but first I have to get over the… enormous stupidity of mankind. Affectionately, Gustav,” reads one.
The Austrian painter was highlighted last year when one of his paintings sold at auction for more than US$40-million.
“Litzlberg on the Attersee,” painted in 1914-1915, stolen by the Nazis during the Second World War and finally returned to the heirs of its Austrian owner, had been expected to draw a scant $25-million. As the New York Times put it, it’s “hardly the greatest landscape ever done by the master. Yet this did not stop it from soaring.” Reservations aside, the painting has an interesting story to tell.
The work had gained international attention earlier in year when Austria’s Museum der Moderne Salzburg agreed to return the work to George Jorisch, the grandson of its owner. The decision followed a 2002 accord struck with Jewish organizations and the Salzburg city government to return assets stolen by the Nazis.
Jorisch, who now lives in Montreal, is the great-nephew of Austrian iron magnate Viktor Zuckerkandl, who was a great collector of Klimt landscapes. When he died in 1927 the work was inherited by his sister Amalie Redlich, Jorisch’s grandmother.
Redlich was deported in 1941 to the Nazi created Lodz ghetto in Poland and never heard from again. Her art collection was seized by the Nazis, sold and ended up in the Austrian museum.
“People love a picture with a story behind it,” said Sotheby’s Simon Shaw ahead of the auction. “It always adds desirability when there is a story behind a painting.”
Gustav Klimit: Life, Work and Achievements could be read in detail here
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