Lot 107. Property from an Important New York Collection. Gustav Klimt (1862 - 1918), Insel im Attersee (Island in the Attersee), signed Gustav Klimt (on the stretcher), oil on canvas, 100.5 by 100.5 cm. Executed circa 1901–02. Lot sold 53,188,500 USD. Courtesy Sotheby's.

NEW YORK, NY.- Moments ago in Sotheby’s New York saleroom, Insel im Attersee by Gustav Klimt achieved $53.2 million, marking one of the most significant prices ever achieved for the artist at auction. Following a 7-minute bidding battle, the work sold to a Japanese private collector bidding with Yasuaki Ishizaka, Chairman & Managing Director for Sotheby's Japan.

Tonight’s auction is especially noteworthy as it marked 83 years since Insel im Attersee played an important role in growing Klimt’s global reputation as the first work by the artist to be exhibited in America. Formerly held in the collection of art historian and gallerist Otto Kallir, the work was part of a small group exhibited at Kallir’s gallery, Galerie St. Etienne, in 1940, as part of the groundbreaking exhibition “Saved from Europe.” The exhibition was a milestone for the artist as well as the Austrian Expressionists, unheard of by many in the U.S. at the time.

Completed between 1901 and 1902, Insel im Attersee showcases Klimt’s at his most daring, enjoying the artistic freedom offered by landscape, a genre unrestrained by the confines of his commissioned works. His early Attersee paintings epitomize Klimt’s approach to composition, with Insel im Attersee perhaps the most radical and striking. The painting is characterized by the distinctive “cropping” of the scene, evident in the ways in which the horizon sits unusually high in the image with the upper edge of the island cut out of the frame. Klimt’s treatment of the subject was similar to that of Monet’s adoption of the square canvas for his Nymphéas series occurring at the same time.

As part of the Modern Evening Auction, tonight’s sale of Insel im Attersee followed the auction of the Mo Ostin Collection, which totaled $123.7 million and included the sale of René Magritte's L'Empire des lumières for $42.3 million.

“Insel im Attersee is one of Gustav Klimt’s most radical landscapes, showcasing the artist’s uninhibited experiments with light and colour, rarely seen before in his oeuvre. It was particularly special to celebrate this painting here in New York, where more than 80 years ago it was among the first by the artist ever exhibited in America, cementing Klimt's legacy as a Modern master." --Helena Newman, Sotheby’s Worldwide Head of Impressionist & Modern Art.

Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge at a boathouse in Litzlberg at Attersee, 1906

Painted at the very beginning of the twentieth century, Insel im Attersee is among Klimt’s most evocative landscapes. Depicting the mesmerizing blue waters of the Attersee (Atter Lake) in Austria, it marks a key moment in Klimt’s career, as he pioneered a new and distinctive approach to landscape painting. In this work, traditional perspective and subject are abandoned to a flood of color and form that borders on the abstract. Klimt creates a composition that immerses the viewer in a contemplation of nature and art that is both timeless and profoundly modern in sensibility.

Klimt’s landscapes form a major part of his oeuvre, though he arrived at them later than other subject matter. From 1898 onwards, when he first began spending summers in the Salzkammergut region of Austria, he was able to paint en plein air for the first time, drawing subjects from the views around him. Over the next two decades landscapes would account for almost half of his output, and they are rightly recognized as a key part of his contribution to modern art. Between 1900 and 1917, Klimt’s summers were spent on the Attersee, staying in Litzlberg (until 1907; see fig. 1) and then in Kammer and Weissenbach. Life there was bucolic—in a letter from the summer of 1902, Klimt described his day: “I get up early in the morning. Usually around 6 a.m., sometimes earlier sometimes later—if I get up and the weather is fine I go off into the nearby wood…. Then I have breakfast and after that a swim in the lake, I’m careful though. Then I paint for a while: if the sun is shining, a picture of the lake, if it’s overcast I work on a landscape from the window of my room… I go for a second swim in the lake; not always but usually. After the snack, back to painting…. Then dusk falls—supper—early to bed, early to rise the next morning” (quoted in Stephan Koja, ed., Gustav Klimt Landscapes, Munich, London, New York, 2019, p. 66).

The beauty of the lake, and this connection with nature, initiated a series of paintings that in many ways mark the evolution of his mature artistic style. Indeed, more than the portraits—which were often constrained by the requirements of commission—or his allegorical works with their heavy symbolism, and increasing controversy in public reception, it is in the landscapes that Klimt found the freedom to focus on the act of painting itself. From the more overtly Symbolist compositions of the late nineteenth century to the large-scale late landscapes, it is possible to track important shifts in the artist’s thinking through these works.

Insel im Attersee is one of two similar views of the lake that Klimt painted between 1900 and 1902, with the earlier of the two now in the collection of the Leopold Museum, Vienna (see fig. 2). Comparison of these two canvases is particularly illuminating in terms of the evolution of Klimt’s style. In the later Insel im Attersee (the present work), Klimt has made crucial adjustments to the composition; the horizon sits higher, almost at the top of the picture plane so that the upper half of the island is cut off, and the viewer is placed in close proximity to the water. As Stephan Koja observes: “In his Attersee paintings… Klimt depicts the surface of the water as a segment, in a similar way to Monet’s depictions of the Seine or the sea; the absence of any foreground deprives the viewer of all means of orientation and, thus, achieves tension in peace. The viewer is placed immediately over the water surface that Klimt has created using regular, short, energetic strokes of radiant colors…. Nothing disturbs the regularity of the water surface, while everything amplifies the impression of a continuum” (ibid., p. 64).

Gustav Klimt (1862 - 1918), Attersee, 1900. The Leopold Museum, Vienna

Evelyn Benesch provides an in-depth analysis of these two paintings, seeing in the two-year trajectory that separates the canvases a sharper and bolder focus on the part of the artist. Beginning by describing the version now in the Leopold Museum she writes: “On Attersee represents another instance in which Klimt uses an unusual compositional angle to convey a more extreme and less familiar vision of nature. The picture—characterized by Hevesi as a ‘frame full of lake water’—is de facto a pure view of water that seems to extend boundlessly beyond the canvas. The surface of the water is interrupted only by Litzlberg Island, which projects into the picture on the high horizon like a dark patch of color. The animated surface of the lake, seen against the light, shimmers in tiny ‘sweeps’ of the brush that grow increasingly smaller towards the horizon and gradually dissolve into one another. Appearing virtually colorless, almost unfinished, on the lightly and thinly primed foreground, they become green strokes before passing in the distance into a pastel-like, solid bluish violet. Two years later Klimt returned to the same motif, in Island in Attersee [the present work]. Litzlberg Island (its top here, too, sliced by the upper edge of the canvas) is now completely surrounded by the lake, which appears in a golden light. The composition—with the lake rising almost to the very top of the canvas—is bolder, the lake itself appears as if folded out, and the viewer is brought closer to the water. At the same time, the picture of the lake with its zones of light and shade seem to move from the background towards the foreground in even, concentric circles, in calm ripples continuing into infinity—an effect arising from the artist’s representation of the small, dark island against the evening light” (Evelyn Benesch, “The Landscapes: A Reconstructed Nature,” Tobias G. Natter, ed., Gustav Klimt, Drawings and Paintings, Cologne, 2018, p. 274).

Klimt’s innovative viewpoint and the square-format makes the water’s surface the complete focus of the composition and is among the first examples of Klimt’s distinctive ‘cropping’ of a scene. Probably suggested to him by his parallel experiments with photography, it was a device the artist would return to over the next decade and which would come to constitute an essential element of his celebrated landscapes (see figs. 4 and 5). Klimt first used this square format in his 1898 allegorical painting Pallas Athene and would continue to use it not only in the landscapes (in which he employed it for the vast majority of his works) but also in his portraiture and other compositions (see fig. 7). In turn, it would be adopted by the artist’s admirers such as Egon Schiele and would also be employed by artists seemingly as divergent from Klimt as Kazimir Malevich.

 Gustav Klimt, Blühender Mohn, 1907, oil on canvas, Belvedere, Vienna

Gustav Klimt, Schloß Kammer am Attersee III, 1910, oil on canvas, Belvedere, Vienna.

Gustav Klimt, Pallas Athene, 1898, Wien Museum, Vienna.

Indeed, Gilles Néret sees congruency in motivation for Klimt and Malevich, writing about these square-shaped compositions: “There is nothing accidental about Klimt’s frequent choice of a square canvas, especially for his landscape paintings. This format, which he had first chosen for Pallas Athene, made it possible for the subject to have an appearance of repose, to be bathed in an atmosphere of peace, as Klimt put it, to become part of the totality of the universe which was so important to him. Malevich was pursuing similar aims with his White Square on White Background, which for him was a cosmic symbol on a higher level than the Christian cross [see fig. 8]. For Klimt, as for Monet in his last active phase, the remarkable property of the square was that it could be developed in any direction without the need for central reference. Monet’s water lilies take up the entire picture and could extend beyond it, and in a similar way Klimt’s landscape motifs are sections of the universe. Unlike the French Impressionists, however, Klimt is not interested in meteorology and changing light; what interests him is the partial representation of a great mystic whole. This is evident from the first in the astonishing pictures of water which he began to paint…on Attersee…” (Gilles Néret, Gustav Klimt 1862-1918, Cologne, 2005, pp. 48 and 52).

Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White. 1918. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Klimt’s treatment of landscape subject was similar to that of Monet’s later work, while Klimt’s adoption of square canvases is contemporaneous to the French artist’s earliest experiments with the same format for his Nymphéas series (see fig. 10). As a founding member of the Vienna Secession, Klimt was influential in bringing works by French artists to Vienna for exhibition and the influence of Impressionism and Pointillism can be felt in the clearly-defined brushstrokes of yellow, green and blue that fill the foreground of the present work. Yet, while the method may have been the same, the intention and effect remained distinct. Klimt does not use this technique to capture light, rather the rapid brushstrokes are used to create a tapestry of color that connect the work with the decorative schemes of Klimt’s figural works and immerses the viewer in an overall sensation.

 Claude Monet, Nymphéas, 1904, oil on canvas, Denver Art Museum.

Johannes Dobai explains further: “Klimt, unlike the Impressionists, was not fascinated by a form of art which represented, ultimately, the perfection of naturalism, and hence the artistic apogee of an empirically positivist view of the world. Instead Klimt’s inner passion was for making his understanding more real—focusing on what constituted the essence of things behind their mere physical appearance …. The development of his treatment of the picture surface reveals that Klimt must have been well acquainted with the techniques of Impressionism and Pointillism, although he did not set pure colors next to one another. He graded his colors in a way which bears comparison to Monet and Seurat, although his—Klimt’s—work is more refined… the artist wished to create a ‘mood’ painting” (Johannes Dobai, Gustav Klimt, Landscapes, London, 1988, pp. 12–15; see fig. 11).

 Georges Seurat, Bathers at Asnières, 1884, oil on canvas, Natonal Gallery, London.

Perhaps the closest similarity to Monet’s work, aside from canvas format, is that Insel im Attersee is truly a painting of water. Jane Kallir, in her analysis of the present work, expands upon these similarities and differences: “It is said that Klimt was fascinated by water and could spend hours just staring at the lake, watching the changing patterns of light and color. His Island in the Attersee (the Litzlberg Island opposite the tavern of the same name where he stayed between 1900 and 1907) is certainly suggestive of such preoccupations. Though aspects of the painting could be called Impressionistic or pointillistic, Klimt was not trying to render the effects of natural light so much as to create a tone-poem wherein multi-hued dabs of paint, tuned to a similar pitch, vibrate together in transcendent harmony. Also characteristic not only of late Impressionism but also of Art Nouveau is Klimt’s high horizon line, which in this case thrusts all the compositional activity almost off the picture plane. Over ninety percent of the painting is pure surface, a delicately modulated field of brush strokes that nearly loses hold of objective reality and approaches total abstraction” (Jane Kallir, Gustav Klimt 25 Masterworks, New York, 1989, p. 18).

The gradations across the water are acutely observed and remarkable in their range; from the glassy sheltered waters of the island to the sunlit waves of the foreground, Klimt evokes his subject with precise detail. The different passages of paint and the nuanced shifts in color across them create a sense of impermanence; as though we too are on the lake, watching the wind move across the water. It is a vision of universal and timeless appeal, almost meditative in nature.

Klimt balances technical experimentation with a deeper understanding of subject: “He turned his knowledge of French painting into a highly individual formal language. Yet at the same time it is interesting that Klimt remained loyal to the Austrian tradition in the selection of his themes. The presence of the same or similar motifs among both his contemporaries and in the art of the second half of the nineteenth century is almost mandatory. The interest in depicting a static nature in which the thriving and prospering of the glory of summer takes place in an almost solemn timelessness runs parallel to this” (Exh. Cat., Paris, Grand Palais, Vienne 1900. Klimt, Schiele, Moser, Kokoschka, 2005–06, p. 172). This interest in communicating something through the evocation of a landscape had its roots in the kind of Symbolist painting that would later evolve into Expressionism. It is most powerfully evinced in the work of artists like Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch (both of whom Klimt admired) but was a trend that connected artists across Europe. Pools or expanses of water in particular had deep symbolic resonance; from Ancient Greek times water symbolized life, and this was a connection that continued through Christian tradition and was given a more personal inflection in the art of the Romantics and into the nineteenth century.

In Klimt’s work water connects the viewer directly with nature through contemplation and the immersion of the viewer within the scene. In this aspect of its character and intention, Insel im Attersee has more in common with the works of later twentieth century artists than that of its contemporaries and in this respect exemplifies Klimt’s innovative and unique contribution to modern art.

Gustav Klimt, Emilie Floge and Hermine Floge, Attersee, 1906. Photograph