Private donation adds rare Klimt photographs to foundation collection

A private donation has given Vienna’s Klimt Foundation, a non-profit research institution, previously unknown photographs documenting Gustav Klimt’s early work, ORF reported Wednesday.

The photographs date from 1883 to 1891 and include commissioned decorative paintings by the Künstler-Compagnie, the trio of Gustav Klimt, his brother Ernst Klimt and Franz Matsch. From the early 1880s, they became known for prestigious commissions in the crown lands, including work at the municipal theatre in Reichenberg and Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum.

The collection includes reproductions of those commissions photographed by court photographer Josef Löwy. Three photographs of work in Reichenberg may have been made for short exhibitions connected with a presentation at the Imperial Royal Austrian Museum for Art and Industry, now the MAK. Other images show Ernst Klimt’s paintings between columns and in spandrels for the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

The donation also includes photographs relating to commissions at Peles Castle and Esterházy Castle. Reproductions of Gustav Klimt’s “ancestral portraits” for Peles Castle were probably made in 1883. The collection also contains a photograph, cut into three pieces, of Klimt’s Allegory of Music.

A photograph from around 1892 shows the theatre hall at Esterházy Castle in Totis, with handwritten instructions from Klimt for taking a new photograph of the room. That image later served as the model for his 1893 painting “Auditorium of the Theatre at Esterházy Castle in Totis.”

The foundation said the materials are valuable sources for Klimt research, both because some of the commissioned decorative work was destroyed and because the photographs document the working process. Detailed findings are due to be presented at the third International Klimt Symposium in autumn 2027.