Anyone seen the klimt exhibition yet-has it already started-and how much to get in???
shirleya

Doesn't start 'til 30th May. See http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/gustavklimt/default.shtm

Thanks a lot-will give me time to save up now-cheers.

Doesn't start 'til 30th May. See http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/gustavklimt/default.shtm

Should be a very interesting exhibition. I like Klimt. I had a nice time a couple of weeks ago here in DC at the Turner exhibition. :PDT_Aliboronz_24:

Chris

hi
not going now to the exhibition-wish i was though. Would love to try and win tickets but it does not start till may so i will see what happens.

Klimpt posters remind me of being a teenager in the 60s, slumming around in my bedroom, listening to Pink Floyd . Lord of The Rings was quite fashionable then as well so I also had a poster of Shadowfax too. Back into the mists of time.........................

http://www.wallpaperlink.com/images/wallpaper/2007/0706/03494x.jpg

Posters, art paintings and arty videos are the only good thing the Tate gets.

Posters, art paintings and arty videos are the only good thing the Tate gets.

What do you want from them Max - the art of pugilism? :)

Nah, not just accept any old junk like a light tube through a matress like I saw last time.

Or electrified Kitchen tools.

Nah, not just accept any old junk like a light tube through a matress like I saw last time.

Or electrified Kitchen tools.

http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/lucas/images/year_of_the_rooster.jpg

They just put a meaning and then It's considered art. Alot of young hippies who go to the tate will be fooled by that junk.:PDT10

Thanks for posting that pic partsky-it is a beautiful painting-i love it-but i do prefer his outside scenes -like the ones in the woods and the buildings-does it say which ones are going to be in the exhibition somewhere????? Oh and does anyone know waht its like to use and get to the liverpool archives-thinking of going sometime soon-never been -are they close to the city centre and railway stations etc???? I have a book with the paintings in which will have to do for now-but maybe i will get to the exhibition somehow-thanks again

Klimt frieze on show in Liverpool

Mark Brown, arts correspondent
Tuesday March 4, 2008
The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/)

A full-scale re-creation of the Beethoven Frieze, the huge 34-metre-long installation by Gustav Klimt, which can only be seen in Vienna, is to be one of the highlights of the first comprehensive exhibition of the artist's work in the UK.

Tate Liverpool said yesterday that the frieze copy, made in 1984 and rarely loaned, will travel to the city for this summer's Klimt exhibition, expected to be one of the biggest crowd-pullers among the European capital of culture events.

The actual frieze, 34 metres long and two metres high, was inspired by Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. It was created by Klimt in 1902 as a "total work of art" celebrating a unification of different artforms including painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry and music. The plan was to destroy it after the exhibition but it was saved and bought by the Lederer family in 1915. After poor storage the frieze was in a sorry state until it was released for restoration in the 1970s.

Christoph Grunenberg, director of Tate Liverpool and co-curator of the Klimt exhibition, said the frieze was "an icon of 20th century art" which would never travel from its home in Vienna. The meticulously-made copy has been seen in Spain and Japan but seldom travels.

The frieze is a highlight in an exhibition of 270 Klimt-related works, including 26 paintings and 29 drawings. Even though Klimt is such a popular artist - his work is fetching some of the highest ever auction prices - there has never been a full exhibition of his work in the UK. The exhibition will include furniture, jewellery, fashion and graphic design.

· Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life in Vienna 1900, May 30-August 31, Tate Liverpool.

Source: The Guardian (http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/news/story/0,,2261838,00.html)

Thanks for that howie-not been on in a while-sounds good-maybe i will go after all. cheers
shirley a

May 3, 2008
Bedazzled: the great and sometimes scandalous artist Gustav Klimt
His work is a heady mix of colour and eroticism. But Gustav Klimt is a mystery to us
Rachel Campbell-Johnston

He is the golden boy of the art world. And it’s easy to see why. It’s right there on the surface of his shimmering confections. We slip into the opulent world of the artist Gustav Klimt like Hollywood movie stars slip into satin dressing-gowns. No wonder his pictures have become commonplace as posters. And yet, what do we know about Klimt the man?

Very little, is the answer. For while Klimt undoubtedly counts as a celebrity A-list artist, he had absolutely no interest in the cult of personality. “I am quite sure that as a person I am not particularly interesting,” he insisted. “There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night. Whoever wants to know something about me ought to look carefully at my pictures.”

Now, at last, we can do this. Later this month, Tate Liverpool will present this country’s first comprehensive show of Klimt’s work. It will be a glittering spectacle. But what can the works add to our meagre knowledge of the artist himself?

Klimt was born in 1862 in a suburb of Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire in which, despite occasional trips abroad and summers spent by mountain lakes, he was to remain all his life. He was the second of the seven children (three boys and four girls) of an impoverished immigrant gold-engraver from Bohemia and his wife who, having longed to be a musical performer, encouraged the artistic dreams of her offspring.

“At Christmas there wasn’t even bread, let alone presents,” one of the Klimt girls later recalled, and little Gustav often had to stay at home because he had no trousers. The memory of this poverty remained with him all his life. But, just as reality is transformed by the Midas touch of his paintings, it was transmuted by his own into something more glamorous. Klimt, believing that the hoarding of capital was a source of economic misery, would spend liberally. He paid his models generously and bought lavish presents of robes and jewels for his many ladies.

He was a bright boy, but without money to pay for school his education was mostly practical. At 14, he enrolled in Vienna’s School of Applied Arts. His brother followed him a year later and together they teamed up with a friend, Franz Matsch, in 1879, to form the artists’ company through which he was to come to recognition as a painter of public murals.

The forthcoming show will follow his career on from there, looking at his great and sometimes scandalous decorative cycles, and his appointment as the first president of the innovative Vienna Secession (a movement stylistically allied to Art Nouveau), which, founded in 1897, fought free of stuffy tradition. It moves on through his so-called “golden phase” when, inspired by trips to Venice and by the Byzantine glint of Ravenna’s basilica, he started to create the wonderful mosaic-style pieces that transformed the Viennese bourgeoisie into seductive beauties.

It is hardly surprising that people started to wonder what went on in his studio. Eroticism was barely made decent by his allegorical veils. Klimt may not have looked much like a Lothario. He was a stocky, rather chubby, man with “the cheerful brusque manners of a boy,” recalled the director of the Kunsthalle. But his studio was clearly a factory for lascivious fantasies where compliant models laid themselves bare to the artist’s brush. Nothing was taboo for the artist, who drew anything from copulating couples through masturbating women to homosexual love. Though Klimt never married or had his own home (he lived with his mother and two sisters), he made an incalculable number of conquests, ranging from the prostitutes whom he paid to sit for him to the wives of the patrons he cuckolded even as they paid him to paint.

On the surface, Klimt complied with respectable tradition. He was a creature of habit. When in Vienna, he would walk to the same café every morning, where he would take breakfast, read the papers and write postcards before taking a cab to his studio. There he worked uninterruptedly – drawing for several hours a day. He was obsessed with his health, working out with dumb-bells or throwing the discus with male models. And he was a terrible hypochondriac, nurturing among his many imaginary diseases a fear of the madness that he believed he would inherit from his mother, who suffered from depression. In the evenings he would break his loner’s routine, sometimes to meet Egon Schiele, an artist who was imprisoned for painting his stark pornographic fantasies, but with whom Klimt was to remain a lifelong friend. Klimt was an enormous influence on Schiele’s work, as he was on that of Oskar Kokoschka and other Secessionists.

In the few surviving photographs of him, Klimt, more often than not, seems to be floating around flowerbeds in the open sandals and flowing robes espoused by the Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese Workshops), a crafts organisation formed to provide an alternative to shoddy mass production. One woman recalled that his body exuded a peculiar, almost animal odour.

He was exceptionally animal-like, she insisted. And she was probably right. This was the man who fathered as many as 14 children by several different women, who had a tempestuously passionate affair with Alma Schindler (who went on to marry Mahler), and who kept a studio full of cats whose urine, he swore, made a perfect fixative for his drawings.

Klimt’s most valued companion was a woman called Emilie Flöge. The two passed indolent summers together on lakeside holidays, and shared intellectual discussions around café tables. Flöge was Klimt’s muse and companion. He wrote to her sometimes as often as eight times a day, and the 400 postcards that survive are one of the most important records of an artist who wasn’t really interested in recording either personal details or painting methods. And yet nobody even knows whether Flöge was simply a friend or whether the pair had once been lovers.

Klimt – perhaps hardly surprisingly – contracted syphilis. In retrospect, it has been suggested that this explained his obsession with his health. Some say that the increasingly voyeuristic erotic drawings of his later age can be explained by the impotence caused by his illness, that he was satisfying his lusts in the only way that he now could.

In January 1918, Klimt suffered a stroke. He lay on the bed, his afflicted hand limp and useless. “Do you know what annoys me most of all?” he told a nephew. “That I have to be taken care of by women’s hands while I lie helpless.” He died a month later of influenza.

But he left behind a legacy in the form of the femmes fatales that he laid down upon his canvases, drifting luxuriously upon their beds of gold. These shimmering lovelies speak of a fundamental – and characteristically modernist – clash between an impassioned individual and the traditional society in which he grows up. And it is precisely this tension that makes them so entrancing, that lends his pictures their timeless allure.

Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life in Vienna 1900, Tate Liverpool, Albert Dock, Liverpool (www.tate.org.uk/liverpool 0151-702 7400), May 30-Aug 31 2008

Source: Times Online (http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article3846810.ece)

Hi to all klimt lovers,

I am great lover of klimt i want to share one thing with all of you regarding klimt reproductions. If you are looking for them then this place will be heaven of klimt reproductions here i got a large variety of klimt reproductions (http://www.oil-paintings-reproductions.com/oil-paintings-reproductions.asp?painter=Gustav%20Klimt). No words i ahve to explain it.

The golden touch

Gustav Klimt was not only a striking portrait painter, but a decorative designer of genius, the creator of candid nudes and richly textured landscapes. It would be foolish to try to resist the beauty and popular appeal of his work, argues Craig Raine

Saturday May 24, 2008
The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/)

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2008/05/23/klimt372.jpg
Warp and weft ... Fritza Riedler (1906) by Klimt. Photograph: The Bridgeman
art library/Tate

Two great portraits by Gustav Klimt, 10 years apart, with a shared secret - one of Fritza Riedler (1906), one of Friederike-Maria Beer (1916).

Fritza Riedler's hair is short, no-nonsense, very faintly unkempt with one or two escaping curls. Her teeth display a winning, subtle asymmetry. Her upper left forearm is so precise in its plumpness that you can guess her age - about 46. Her expression is warily intelligent. She might be the (quietly sexy) wife of a head of college - were she not richly arrayed like the wealthy person she is. Behind her head, Klimt has placed a secular mosaic-enamel halo, a bit like a stained-glass window, and she is sitting in a backless armchair, which has been transformed by Klimt into a decorative accessory. In the preparatory drawings, the chair is conventional enough - and you can still make out the armrests, as well as the (less readable) pleated valances at the base of the chair. In the finished portrait, however, it is a flat honeycomb of blanched-almond statue eyes, though the overall effect created by the chair is the sway of the sea, ripple and wave. Fritza Riedler emerges from the chair, her expensive, pale eau de Nil dress pouring down her, like Venus Anadyomene emerging from the ocean - goddess and bluestocking.

Friederike-Maria Beer, with her faint moustache and her pragmatic, assessing eyes, is painted against an oriental screen of battling warriors - apparently taken from a Korean vase in Klimt's possession. Her standing figure is conterminous with the teeming tapestry "behind" her. Tapestry and woman exist in the same plane. Her head and her hands are transfigured by the welter of stuff around them, stuff taken, as it were, from the dressing-up box - so they are granted nakedness. They are the only naked things. Which is not the way we usually think of faces and fingers. The shared secret of these ostensibly different portraits is - accessories, incidentals, decorative "accidentals".
From a foot away, 826 Ettrick Sporting Tweed Thrie Estaits has a clear, defined pattern, a grid of alternating brown and paler brown squares. Something simple, manly, frank. But if you look closely, the material reveals heather threads and green threads, so subtle as to be almost invisible. These are eye-shadow pastels. This is an allegory of the macro and the micro in art.

Picasso is famously various - the blue period, the pink period, cubism, analytical cubism, the neoclassical period, the surreal 30s, the postwar pro-communist kitsch welter of doves, harlequins, clowns and those lazy cartoon kings. So various, in fact, that it is difficult to see the pattern in the warp and the weft - the pattern, the template, the tweed in his work, the recurrent artistic idea. It's all apparently inchoate cornucopia, a mass of unexpected threads - Ezra Pound's "wilderness of broken mirrors".

Coleridge says in Biographia Literaria that great artists can be animated for a lifetime by one idea, one discovery. Picasso's dominating idea is sculpture - bringing the values of sculpture to the one-dimensional canvas surface with its familiar illusions of three-dimensionality and perspective. Picasso is interested in every inflection of sculpture, of different kinds of sculpture. For example, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, his brothel picture of 1907, would not be possible without the visual example of African carving. Those bold diagonal strokes representing shade down one side of the nose are a trope taken from the coarsely chiselled profiles of African art. Cubism is, in essence, an equivalent of the radically unstable viewpoint we deploy when we walk round a sculpture. Collage insists on actual three-dimensionality.

A picture such as Picasso's The Two Brothers (1906) reproduces the powdery pinks of terracotta garden sculpture in the naked boys. The little brother being piggy-backed has in the corner of his only visible eye a squidged lump of pigment - a nod, a tribute to the imperfection of swiftly worked clay. But the crucial sculptural value is present in the canvas weave itself - whose rough nubbly texture, whose burly Braille, is like unpolished granite. Small wonder, then, that Picasso should be a brilliantly original, if intermittent, sculptor all his life.

Klimt was a student at the Kunstgewerbeschule when the Viennese historical painter Hans Makart was at his most celebrated. Klimt was a fervent admirer. Makart's The Entry of Charles V into Antwerp (1878) is representative of the bombastic art that Klimt eventually rejected for a different kind of painting, which has art historians expressing baffled regret that he somehow failed to register historical background in his pictures. "One searches in vain for any sign of these momentous events in Klimt's work," writes Frank Whitford, looking for evidence of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo and the collapse of the Habsburgs and the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Klimt's flirtation with this kind of epic, overweight, overcrowded picture - somewhere between Wembley stadium and a mass grave - is pared down, spliced with symbolist aesthetic and allegory, but over-impressed by the idea of size. As if a great picture were a large picture. Beethoven Frieze (1902) was painted to showcase a monumental sculpture of Beethoven by Max Klinger. It is less pullulating than a Makart, but has fatally pompous Wagnerian elements of Nibelungenlied. In the panel known as "Longing for Happiness", for example, there is a knight, in golden armour, with a perm like Kevin Keegan's of yesteryear, apparently representing the strong führer. He is surrounded by suffering mankind, in the form of several supplicating nudes, and two female figures representing compassion and ambition.

Wagner invented the idea of the total artwork, the Gesamtkunstwerk - a notion that proved, indirectly, to be Klimt's artistic salvation. (The Ring is the ultimate control feat by a control freak.) The Viennese secession, led by Klimt, among others, was a precursor to the Bauhaus - and the idea that art could be applied to every aspect of life, much as, in 19th-century England, Pugin's Roman Catholic aesthetic was (mysteriously, solipsistically) applied to doorknobs, fire irons, floor tiles. Josef Hoffmann, an architect, designed a chair for Klimt, and monogrammed cutlery in a 106-piece set (for Lili and Fritz Waerndorfer, 1904-8), a tea and coffee set for Margaret Wittgenstein-Stonborough, cigarette boxes, vases, buckles - all in Jugendstil, the Viennese version of art nouveau. Klimt made book plates and clothing labels (for his mistress Emilie Flöge's dress business). Like Oscar Wilde, like George Bernard Shaw, he believed in dress reform. When he wasn't dressed like a banker in striped morning trousers - with a firm fistful of gloves, and holding the brim of his hat - Klimt was naked under a self-designed burnous.

What Klimt learnt from this fusion of art and craft proved to be crucial to his art - saving it from aesthetic inflation. The Gesamtkunstwerk gave him his idea, the idea that would lift him above the level of hyper-skilful painter to great artist. His greatest paintings are a conflation of two skills - extraordinary in combination, less extraordinary in isolation. Klimt was a striking portrait painter, swift to achieve a likeness, accurate to the point of genius. He was also, it transpired, a remarkable decorative designer. His paintings are very beautiful, obviously beautiful - and some, unsurprisingly, have been owned by Estée Lauder and Barbra Streisand. There is a popular appeal here - an appeal it would be snobbish and foolish to resist. Think of Matisse's vibrant charm. Or the way certain Jackson Pollocks have been annexed of late to the decorative camp (unpersuasively in my view). The beauty is all in the flat textile element. The sitters are seen exactly as they are - a different beauty, which can encompass imperfection, the ghost of a moustache, a deformed finger, awkward angularity, prominent teeth, plumpness. The beauty in the portraiture is partly the pleasure of accuracy, but more substantially the pleasure of form - form so delicately done it is almost invisible.

When form is obtrusive, it is lesser. In 1981, there was an exhibition of photographs by Helmut Newton (reprinted in Photographies 1980-1981) at the Daniel Templon gallery in rue Beaubourg, Paris. The flyer showed a nude woman, her face in profile, her body three-quarter facing the viewer. Her right breast looks us directly in the eye like a target. Her left breast is in profile, more or less. Its under-curve is echoed by the line of her rib cage as it comes to the waist. Her left arm is arranged. It has designs on us. The elbow is posed facing out - to mirror the left breast - and the back of the hand rests against the top of the pelvis. A thing never seen in nature. Utterly artificial.

Now consider Klimt's first portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (1907). The chair she sits in burns like a throne ... and enfolds her like a floor-length spreading train. She wears two bracelets on her left arm. Her throat is invisible under a choker the size of a small flowerbed. Her dress has jewelled shoulder straps. It is narrow, a kind of textile backgammon board at the bust, the body of the dress an aquarium of golden fish, of eyes like beaten gold, dense with luxury. Painters who have ambitions to paint gold - not an easy thing - should consult this Klimt. He solves the problem directly - by using gold.

Bloch-Bauer's face has a slightly retroussé mouth - full lips, handsome without being quite conventionally so. Her eyes are intelligent and grave. Klimt has painted reserve, distance - flesh and blood, sure enough, but at a lower temperature than the expression usually implies. The hands are remarkable - thin, elegant, perhaps a little cold - and arranged at once elaborately and plausibly. You feel that they are composed by the sitter, not by the artist.

But, of course, they are arranged by Klimt. Bloch-Bauer's hair is equally elaborate, equally composed, cropped at the top by the edge of the canvas. Its extraordinary outline - it might be topiary - is mirrored exactly by the shape of her two hands. Neither the hair nor the hands can be described in words. Their shared shape is so utterly out of nature, it resembles nothing except itself - an artificiality the sitter has learned to live with quite easily, quite naturally by now.

Klimt, like his disciple Egon Schiele, is also known for his candid nudes - women masturbating, semi-clothed, innuendos of lesbianism. Art historians tend to worry away at the moral propriety of these pictures. Are they titillating? They are frankly sexual in the way Donne is in "To His Mistress Going to Bed", when he instructs his mistress to "cast all white linen hence" and show herself as to a midwife. Klimt himself was unworried about proprieties, saying that the arse of one of his models was "more beautiful and intelligent ... than many faces".

Everyone knows about these nude pictures - and they are terrific - but Klimt's landscapes are greater and less appreciated. They show the conflation of textile with reality. In Farmhouse with Birches (1900), the farmhouse is relegated to the far background. The foreground is taken up with turf, and a few wild flowers. A picture of grass, then, with the trunks of four silver birches. All branches and foliage are out of the picture. On the right, a thin birch trunk runs slightly askew from the top of the canvas to the bottom. The other three trunks to the left come a third of the way down the painting. You have to look at the composition for quite a long time before you identify the textile technique involved. At first, I thought of drawn-thread work - where you pull threads in one direction to create a diaphanous line, like the ladder in a stocking. Then I realised Klimt's birch trunks are mimicking trapunto, where raised decorative matter is sewn on to/into the textile, bringing supplementary textures to the flat material.

Beeches (1900) is the familiar barcode effect, but the horizon five-eighths of the way up the painting creates the idea of a loom with warp and weft. Field of Poppies (1907) is the painterly equivalent of a pretty floral print. When we think about prints, we tend to isolate the pattern and its repeats. Klimt knew, as print designers know, that the pattern is there but is obscured by folds, by the very act of being worn. In Field of Poppies, you can hardly stop the feeling in yourself that, could Klimt's landscape only be straightened out, the slightly obscured pattern would be clearly visible - whereas, for the moment, it is merely shy but about to overcome its embarrassment and show us everything.

The Park (1909-10), which hangs in MoMA in New York, takes the idea of textile to its most radical expression. Nine-tenths of the canvas is foliage, brushstrokes, serried leaves that almost lose their source in nature and become abstract, pure pigment, printed textile close to pattern. Then, right at the very bottom of the painting, Klimt allows us to see tree trunks, dwarfed by the canopy above. The painting is like a swallow dive. I used to think that this name referred to the flight of the bird. In fact, it refers to the action of the gullet. In The Park, the eye falls the full length of the picture, headlong through space, from morn to noon, from noon to dewy eve, a summer's day, before Klimt rescues us from vertigo with a gratifying gulp, at the very last moment - returning us to the safety of suddenly recognisable reality.

· Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life in Vienna, 1900 is at Tate Liverpool from May 30 to August 31. Details: tate.org.uk/liverpool

Source: guardian.co.uk (http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2281997,00.html)

http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/gustavklimt/images/logo_lg.gif (http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/gustavklimt/default.shtm)

www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/gustavklimt/default.shtm (http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/gustavklimt/default.shtm)

Tate Liverpool gets ready for Gustav Klimt launch day
May 28 2008
by Catherine Jones, Liverpool Echo

http://images.icnetwork.co.uk/upl/article/11162100/2008/05/28/12173568.jpeg

TATE Liverpool staff were today getting ready for the gallery’s showcase Gustav Klimt exhibition.

The show, which opens at the Albert Dock gallery on Friday, is the first comprehensive exhibition of the Viennese artist’s work ever staged in the UK.

It is expected to be one of the highlights of Capital of Culture year.

Major paintings and drawings were flown in from across the world for the exhibition, which features more than 200 artworks and runs until August 31.

It includes a reconstruction of Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, which sees painting, sculpture, architecture and music combined.

Source: Liverpool Echo (http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/local-news/2008/05/28/tate-liverpool-gets-ready-for-gustav-klimt-launch-day-100252-20984980/)

Klimt show 'set to break records'

Tate Liverpool is poised for a record number of visitors for its exhibition on artist Gustav Klimt, staff say.

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44697000/jpg/_44697426_klimt_portrait_afp226.jpg
A preview of the exhibition was held at
the Tate on Thursday

More than 16,000 tickets have been sold for Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design And Modern Life In Vienna 1900, which opens to the public on Friday.

Director of Tate Liverpool, Christoph Grunenberg, said he spent four years working to bring it to the UK.

The exhibition, which is part of the Capital of Culture events, is the first in the UK to focus solely on Klimt.

"There have been shows where Klimt work has been included but never where it was a focus," said Mr Grunenberg.

"I'm very pleased with it. I see it as a coup that we have managed to stage a Klimt show under very difficult conditions."

Mr Grunenberg said the fragile condition of Klimt paintings and values "going through the roof" made it difficult to stage such an exhibition.

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44697000/jpg/_44697427_klimt_wide_pa226.jpg
"We have already had more than 16,000
ticket sales" Tate spokeswoman

He added: "People are reluctant to lend paintings. I doubt there will ever be another exhibition due to the values and costs involved.

"The way it is going, the number of visitors will exceed our target of 100,000."

Tobias Natter, director of the Vorarlberg State Museum in Bregenz, Austria, and co-curator of the Klimt exhibition, said: "He (Gustav Klimt) was a leading member of the Viennese Secession, a progressive group of artists and artisans.

"It was Gustav Klimt and his fellows, artist fellows, who gave a significant contribution to the modern art of the 20th Century."

Mr Natter said the exhibition included many of Klimt's outstanding works of art, including landscapes, portraits and the female portraits he is known for.

A Tate spokeswoman said it was the "most comprehensive" exhibition of the artist that has been staged in the UK.

Ministerial approval

The gallery was "on target" for a record number of visitors for the show, she added.

Culture Secretary Andy Burnham said the exhibition was a "major coup" for the European Capital of Culture.

He also said he was "delighted" by the progress of the city's reign as Europe's cultural capital.

Mr Burnham said: "The cultural organisations are really rising to the challenge.

"It really is having a galvanising impact on the city and it's doing everything that the Government hoped it would when we awarded the title to the city."

The Klimt exhibition runs until 31 August.

Source: BBC NEWS | Merseyside (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/7424553.stm)

Gustav Klimt exhibition: 27,000 tickets sold
Jun 4 2008
by Catherine Jones, Liverpool Echo

http://images.icnetwork.co.uk/upl/article/11162100/2008/06/04/12178610.jpeg

KLIMT MANIA has hit Liverpool as the city goes wild for the Viennese artist.

More than 27,000 tickets have been sold for the Tate’s Gustav Klimt exhibition, 20,000 before the doors opened for the first time last Friday.

An average of 1,700 people are flocking to the Albert Dock gallery each day.

Tate officials say queues are forming up to an hour before opening time, and on the first day visitors started arriving shortly after 8am.

Staff have also reported some people being moved to tears by the exhibition.

Tate Liverpool director Christoph Grunenberg said today: “We knew Klimt was a revered artist, but the popularity of the exhibition in the opening few days has surpassed our expectations.

“There’s a clear sense of excitement throughout the gallery.”

When the Tate hosted the Turner Prize last December, the gallery’s main lifts could not cope with the demand.

This time the goods lift has also been pressed into action to transport the large number of visitors from the ground floor gallery, which features an exact replica of Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, to the fourth floor.

More than half the visitors have travelled to see the exhibition from across the UK, with another 43% from the north west, half from Merseyside.

The remaining numbers, around 2%, are foreign visitors.

A Tate spokeswoman said: “The shop has had as many customers in three days as it would usually see in a month and stock has been flying off the shelf.”

Art lovers from all over the country were among the crowds at the Tate.

Maisie Spencer of Bramhall, Cheshire, said: “It’s absolutely wonderful, very extensive and really well planned.”

Anne Wyness, from Liverpool, said: “It was really excellent, definitley worth a visit.”

Pat Helle, of London, said “It was interesting, different and eye-opening. I thoroughly enjoyed it.”

Source: Liverpool Echo (http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/local-news/2008/06/04/gustav-klimt-exhibition-27-000-tickets-sold-100252-21021402/)

How do they know where all the visitors are from?
Do you have to say when you buy a ticket?

How do they know where all the visitors are from?
Do you have to say when you buy a ticket?

Yes - whether you book online, by telephone, or in person at the gallery they require your address.

Yes - whether you book online, by telephone, or in person at the gallery they require your address.

Of course.
A classic example of me utilising my keyboard without putting my brain in gear.
All the visitors so far will have booked in advance.

When I pay at the door I'll refuse to say where I'm from!

I went last weekend, was very good. The more well known paintings that he did were more towards the second half, but the story of how he was the leader of the Viennese Secession i had no idea of and the art and design work (Architecture included) is quite impressive.

I'd recommend people to go although i'd wait for a few weeks till the queues die down

Sounds like a wonderful exhibit... Nice to have such art at your doorstep.. If there are lines waiting to see it.. that says a lot...

Love the colors in those paintings