Fragments of The Beethoven Frieze I from Das Werk Gustav Klimts printd in 1908-1914

One of two sheets from Das Werk Gustav Klimts representing the six panels of the Beethoven Frieze. The original frieze, created in 1902, was installed in the room on the left side of the Vienna Secession building in connection with an exhibition of Max Klinger's statue of Beethoven. In its entirety the frieze had a complex iconographic program that depicts mankind in a search for happiness that leads him through a minefield of sin and folly but is eventually rewarded with Joy (Freude), represented by the ecstatic union of a naked man and woman. The couple is surrounded by a choir of angels, similar in concept to those who surround the Virgin and Child in Majesty by Duccio di Buoninsegna in the main panel of Maessta Altarpiece, from the Sienna Cathedral (and in many similar medieval compositions). The bodies of the joyful couple are highlighted by an area of heavenly gold that is activated with a swirling texture and embodiments of the divine. Klimt's work is a paraphrase of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which ends with the Ode to Joy, a poem by Friedrich Schiller (1785). The final words of the poem are "Joy, beautiful spark of Gods."

A complete set of Das Werk Gustav Klimts (the Work of Gustav Klimt) contained 50 prints on heavy wove paper with deckled edges. Issued unbound, the prints were divided into five groups of ten, each group including two multicolored images. Groups were published separately over a period of six years and sold only by subscription through the publisher, H.O. Miethke. The prints depict Klimt's most important paintings dating from between 1898 and 1913. Because Klimt personally supervised the project and insisted on the proper resolution of technical problems, the 50-print project, which was undertaken by early 1908, was not completed until 1914.

Das Werk Gustav Klimts demonstrates the remarkable ability of the collotype to render gradations of tone, color and texture. All sheets and most of the images are in a square format, with the remainder in the narrow rectangle format derived from Japanese paintings and woodblock pillar prints. Klimt designed a unique signet for each print, to be centered beneath the image and impressed in gold ink.

The first group of 10 was offered at the Kunstschau in June 1908 and the first purchaser was Emporer Franz Joseph. Ironically, this group included depictions of three state- commissioned paintings that had been declared pornographic and led to Klimt's "exile" from the world of public art eight years earlier.

The final installment of Das Werk became available in 1914, the same year that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo. Within three months, most of Europe, Russia, UK and all of its colonies, and Japan were engaged in the Great War. The fighting came to an official end on November 11, 1918, with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

Apparently, as the war was winding down Hugo Heller of Vienna was preparing to offer the complete set of Das Werk Gustav Klimts as a boxed portfolio of loose prints in an edition of 230. Because the prints in the Heller edition seem in every way exact matches to the prints in the Galerie Miethke edition, art historians speculate with a reasonable degree of certainty that Heller's 230 were the balance of unsold sets from the Miethke edition, preserved during the war.

Serena and August Lederer once owned the monumental images of "Philosophy," "Medicine" and "Jurisprudence" that had been painted for the University of Vienna. A decade later, Klimt's 1902 Beethoven Frieze, the nearly 35-meter-long homage to the power of the composer's art, also came into Lederer's hands, along with the preparatory drawings. In 1928 the Lederers acquired the much acclaimed early paintings "Music" and "Schubert at the Piano

August died in 1936. A year later, Serena, fled the Nazis by returning to Budapest, where she died in 1943. The Klimt paintings were taken over by the state with the usual rationale that they constituted partial payments for debts owed by the Lederer industries.

The Third Reich, although it considered Klimt somewhat of a degenerate, hid the collection in a castle in Immendorf, a hamlet in lower Austria not far from the Czech border. (The Beethoven Frieze was stored elsewhere.) In May 1945, as the Russians came over that border, the German unit that had been garrisoned in the castle retreated, but not before laying explosives. Between May 8 and May 11, the building and its contents burned to the ground.