Gustav Klimt

Summer Sojourns on the Attersee 1900-1916

Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) the famous Austrian Jugendstil artist made a lasting impact on the period of Vienna 1900 which continues to fascinate and resonate today. Klimt has made his mark especially on fin-de-siècle Vienna together with his fellow artists, among them Josef Hoffmann, Kolo Moser, Otto Wagner and Joseph Maria Olbrich. Away from the metropolis Vienna, Klimt derived important inspiration from the landscape surrounding the Attersee during his summer holidays between 1900 and 1916, creating more than 40 of his almost 50 known landscapes here. Comparable to Paul Cézanne’s Aix en Provence, Claude Monet’s Giverny and Egon Schiele’s Krumau, the Attersee was a place of unique artistic activity for the artist.

The publication series Edition Klimt published by the Klimt Foundation sheds light on select artistic and personal milestones in the life and oeuvre of the Austrian Jugendstil artist.

The second volume of this series is dedicated to the artist’s preferred holiday destination Attersee, offering insights into Klimt’s discovery of the Attersee as a refuge for the obligatory Sommerfrische and illustrating the artist’s ambivalent longing to be there by means of numerous paintings, unique documents, photographs and correspondence.