New York: Solomon R. Gugenhaim Museum, 1965. — 126 p.The Exhibition booklet.
Uncolored.
Gustav Klimt has never had a significant one-man exhibition in an American museum. Egon Schiele was seen importantly in American museums only once when Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art presented a one-man show which subsequently travelled during the season of 1960—61. The current effort which groups together the two Austrian masters is by far the most ambitious among
contemporary presentations. Works by the younger Schiele were borrowed from sources throughout the world and only a few refusals of importance have been sustained. With the massive help of private and public collections in Austria, the United States and in other
countries, the Schiele retrospective is made up of major works from all periods. Klimt too is shown through kev works but not in comparable fullness. This limitation is, in part, enforced by external conditions and partly arrived at through deliberate decision. Some owners of important works felt obliged to decline our requests for Klimt's paintings for fear that the frail and vulnerable canvases of the Art Nouveau master would suffer through a transatlantic shipment. It was by choice, however, that Klimt is here presented substantially only through works dated after 1900 and that no effort was made to gather his earlier work. Revealing as such inclusions would have been, a selection so conceived would have favored an historic rather than an esthetic point of view. This would have been contrary to our intentions.
