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Now that
Roses Under the Trees (1905), the only painting by Gustav Klimt in a French national museum, is due to be restituted from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to the heirs of Viennese Jews whom the Nazis robbed, eyes are on another Klimt landscape painting believed to be in France:
Apple Tree II (1916), returned to the wrong family 20 years ago after it was confused for
Roses Under the Trees, and now held by billionaire Bernard Arnault.
Apple Tree II was owned by Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt, the daughter of Erich and Serena Lederer, from a family of Jewish distillers, before the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938. Many of the Lederers’ paintings were seized and major works by Klimt were destroyed in 1945, including another possible arboreal landscape
Gustav Klimt,
Die Medizin (Kompositionsentwurf) (1897–98).
“All art is erotic,” Klimt once mused. That same philosophy occasionally got the artist into hot water. Klimt, who was notorious for his amorous proclivities (he is believed to have fathered some 14 children), emerged as a unique voice during a period of intense modernization in Vienna. At the dawn of the 20th century, long-standing Catholic traditions were upended by radical philosophies and the emerging field of psychology, including the writings of the city’s own Sigmund Freud.
Meanwhile, Vienna Secession artists like Klimt (and his admirers Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka) sought to fuse visions of the sacred and the profane, abandoning the formalities of academic styles, and embracing themes of desire, sexuality, and psychology, while freely incorporating elements of design.
Walter Hochauer
In the early 1990s, an intact mummy was discovered in the Ötztal Alps, on the Italian-Austrian border, that proved to be more than 5,000 years old. What is known today as Austria has been populated for a very long time; the buildings here are just a blip on the region’s history, but they’re all worth seeing when you’re next there.
Earlier versions of the descriptions of these buildings first appeared in 1001 Buildings You Must See Before You Die
, edited by Mark Irving (2016). Writers’ names appear in parentheses.
Schloss Belvedere
The two parts of the 18th-century Schloss Belvedere, southeast of Vienna, were built for Prince Eugen of Savoy. The Lower Belvedere, built first, is a single-story pavilion with a mansard roof and a raised centerpiece containing the Marble Hall, with frescoes by Martino Altomonte. The Upper Belvedere, built about ten years later, stands on higher ground to the south and is a more complex structure with three stories and an a