Werner Hofmann

Gustav Klimt und die Wiener Jahrhundertwende
VOLUME 167

A Lively Panorama of Turn-of-the-Century Vienna

Gustav Klimt’s (1862–1918) pictures are abidingly popular with broad audiences who, in the absence of any historical perspective, relish the ready-for-reproduction golden sheen of his art nouveau painting. The art historian Werner Hofmann complicates this pleasure by embedding Klimt’s oeuvre in the context of contemporary Austrian art; and more, by reading it as a historic document of the doomed monarchy. Art nouveau, Hofmann proposes, was the final—and failing—attempt to heal the rupture between artistic and societal forms with an elitist doctrine of art.

Werner Hofmann (b. Vienna, 1928; d. Hamburg, 2013) was an art historian, cultural journalist, writer, and director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. In addition to lecturing and teaching and publishing on the art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he curated numerous exhibitions. In 1991, he was awarded the Sigmund Freud Prize for Academic Prose.