Gustav Klimt | 47 Drawings

The first collection – a series of twenty-five collotypes in an edition of 500 was printed in 1919.  The original pencil sketches, from which these collotypes were taken, were selected from August and Serena Lederer’s vast collection of Klimt’s works – a collection that was later seized by the Nazi’s in 1938 so many now only exist as these collotypes. All the works were printed posthumously, one year after Klimt’s death, by the Kunstanstalt Max Jaffé, a Viennese specialist in fine art collotypes. The complex collotype printing process perfectly rendered Klimt’s spontaneous drawing style. It is believed that the artist had some involvement with the production planning due to the meticulous nature of the printing and attention to detail. Klimt had overseen the production of the plates for Das Werk, published the preceding year, making sure each one was to his exact specifications, a level of quality carried through similarly in Twenty-Five drawings. 

The second folio we have is a series of lithographs printed in 1964. This series was selected by Alice Strobel, an academic who dedicated her studies to Klimt. She focused on works deemed most representative of Klimt’s flowing and quick style, spanning the breadth of his career. The scope of this collection offers numerous portraits of women from Viennese society as well as drawings featuring all the major themes in Klimt’s work such as love, eros and death.