ALL THAT GLITTERS

The showmanship of Gustav Klimt.

- JACKSON ARN

The art of Gustav Klimt makes me feel as though I am face to face with God, if God is a charming, faintly trashy type who leers more than he enlightens and seems oddly desperate for my approval. Klimt’s mysticism is a kind of busy stagecraft, all confetti cannons and angels dangling from ropes. It drove people wild a hundred and twenty-five years ago and still does, though a closer look at his path from academic painter to Viennese radical to professional heiress-glorifier suggests a man stuck between nineteenth- and twentieth-century attitudes, and all the more fascinating for it. In a photograph taken around 1908, a decade before his death, he wears a floor-length smock and points his big, wolfish head at the darkness, arms crossed. He looks like a crook disguised as a priest, the better to get his way.

A version of the smock, and many of the paintings he finished while wearing it, can be found at “Klimt Landscapes,” the Neue Galerie’s second major show since closing for renovations last summer. The theme is a head-scratcher: who thinks of Klimt, with his gold leaf and gorgeous women, as a painter of nature? Only a small fraction of the works here qualify as landscapes, and many of these were completed toward the end of Klimt’s life, when he was between portraits of wealthy sitters, summering in the Austrian countryside and—the show stresses this point— painting for his own pleasure. When artists create for themselves, we tend to assume that the results are more personal, but the rule seems iffier in the case of this taciturn yet resolutely public figure, who may have been most himself when he had spectators and a trunkful of props to wow them with.