Summary: During the boom years of the Gründerzeit, a profusion of palaces and grand public buildings was built around Vienna’s magnificent boulevard, the Ringstrasse. The Belvedere’s exhibition Klimt and the Ringstrasse – A Showcase of Grandeur focuses on the charismatic Ringstrasse painters who shaped their era. Starting with the oeuvre of the “painter prince” Hans Makart, the exhibition traces developments up to the triumph of Gustav Klimt and his painters’ collective, the Künstler-Compagnie. Reconstructions of entire decorative ensembles will present glimpses of the glittering lifestyle in the Ringstrasse era to visitors. The Vienna Ringstrasse is one of the most striking ensembles of architecture in the city and a fundamental part of the World Heritage Site, the “historic centre of Vienna”. Its construction in the late nineteenth century expressed Vienna’s claim to be the sole centre of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the same time it documented the empire’s status as a major political power on the European continent. Building began in the 1860s but was only largely complete when World War I broke out. With the Ringstrasse, Vienna presented itself as a new, dynamic, and prestigious centre of trade and commerce. The exhibition will feature paintings to decorate the Burgtheater and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, designs for the magnificent rooms at Palais Epstein, Makart’s painting for Nikolaus Dumba’s study, some of the embellishments for Dumba’s music room by Gustav Klimt and the Künstler-Compagnie, and furnishings belonging to Makart. Objects owned by patrons such as Friedrich von Leitenberger and Nikolaus Dumba will be presented as well as precious pieces from the Bloch-Bauer family’s collections. The exhibition unveils a differentiated view of an epoch that, using new means of industrial production and reproduction, in many ways surpassed the possibilities of craftsmanship and was in quest of a new canon of values in art.

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