Klimt Villa

Klimt Villa (i.e. Villa Werner) is a building located in the Hietzing district of Vienna built in the early 1920s upon the last Viennese studio of the painter Gustav Klimt.

The association of the term ''villa'' with the name ''Klimt'' is ahistorical but has served since to promote the preservation of the building since the 1990s. Klimt did not live in a two-storey, upper-class villa but rather in an unadorned, single-storey country cottage.

History

Klimt's atelier

Building research by Helmut and Heide Buschhausen, Mario Schwarz and Gerhard Weißenbacher has proven that Gustav Klimt's last atelier (studio), used from 1911/1912 to 1918, was incorporated as the ground floor of the present two-storey building at the address Feldmühlgasse 11 (formerly Feldmühlgasse 9 and Wittegasse 15).

In the summer of 1998, further research by Herbert Rasinger and Gerhard Weissenbacher conclusive proof is provided. A considerable part of the controversy over the sale and demolition or preservation of the building, which lasted for more than ten years, revolved around this long-disputed fact.

According to the current state of research, it seems likely that the painter Felix Albrecht Harta, who was a friend of Klimt and also of the family who owned the property, the furniture manufacturer Josef Hermann, recommended that he rent the ''simple one-storey country house with high windows'' (according to Arthur Roessler) as a studio. Klimt wrote on 26 August 1911 to the editor of the address book publisher Lehmann: "My present address is 'Gustav Klimt, painter, XIIIth, Feldmühlgasse 9, no longer VIII Josefstädterstr. 21'." Previously, his studio was located in the garden pavilion of the house at Josefstädter Strasse 21 in Josefstadt from 1892 to 1911.

In November 1912, Klimt's fellow painter Egon Schiele, whom he helped as a fatherly friend, rented a studio at 101 Hietzinger Hauptstraße, just four blocks from Klimt's house. In ''Lehmann's Allgemeiner Wohnungs-Anzeiger'' Klimt was listed only with the address Feldmühlgasse (then with house number 9) from 1912 to 1915. After the death of his mother Anna, he appeared in the ''Lehmann'' from 1916 onwards at her last residential address Westbahnstraße 36 in Vienna Neubau.

Klimt's catalogue raisonné contains about twelve pictures which, if not active in summer at Attersee, he is likely to have painted in the Feldmühlgasse house. Among others, the painting '' am Attersee'' (1914), which was sold at an auction in New York in November 2011 for 40.4 million dollars (29.5 million euros), was painted here after his return from a summer retreat at the lake.

Expansion into a villa

In 1922, the culturally interested Hermann family (involved, among other things, with Harta in the founding process of the Salzburg Festival) began building a villa around the preserved walls of Klimt's last place of work, but apparently had to interrupt it for economic reasons. After the death of Josef Hermann, the building was sold as a shell by the now sole owner and widow Helene Hermann in 1922.

The purchaser was Ernestine Werner, who soon married the wine wholesaler Felix Klein. She had the villa completed as a two-storey neo-baroque building with a flight of steps in the "Rosenkavalier style", which was widespread among the K.u.k.-nostalgic (especially Jewish) upper middle classes at the time. Felix Klein was listed in Lehmann's Vienna address book in 1928 for the first time, and in 1939 for the last time, with the address Feldmühlgasse 11. (An account by contemporary witness Edith Crossman, née Werner, provides information about the cultivated life in this ambience).

State property

The Jewish Klein family had to flee in 1939 and sold the villa, which had been restituted in 1948, in 1954 for 500,000 shillings to the Republic of Austria, which used the building for school purposes and added modern, ground-level buildings in the surrounding area. Shortly before 2000, a citizens' initiative turned against the sale of the building by the federal authorities, mainly for financial reasons, and constituted itself in January 1999 as the ''Verein Gedenkstätte Gustav Klimt'' and demanded the preservation of the parts of the building with the studio and its extensive garden. The association received the villa from the state in 2002–2007 as a precarium contract (Bittleihe) and appeared in public with various cultural events.

Controversy

In 2007, the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere under its new director Agnes Husslein

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