"THE GAZE FROM THE FRAME": NEW EXHIBITION AT THE LEOPOLD MUSEUM SHOWS PORTRAITS OF LITERARY FIGURES FROM THE “KLEWAN COLLECTION” DONATION

10.05.2022

On display are portraits of eminent dramatists, novelists and poets from Shakespeare to Jelinek

The presented portraits of George Sand, Ricarda Huch, Elfriede Jelinek, Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare, Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo and Arthur Schnitzler were drawn, etched, printed or photographed by eminent artists and photographers, including Pablo Picasso, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Oppenheimer, Salvador Dalì, Isolde Ohlbaum and Franz Hubmann.

On Thursday evening, the Leopold Museum opened an exhibition in honor of the collector and long-standing gallery owner Helmut Klewan (born in 1943), who has gifted a generous and extensive donation, comprising some 350 works, of portraits from the world of literature to the museum.

“Receiving a donation of this scale is a rarity. It allows us to not only organize an exhibition in gratitude for this gift but to also make the majority of these donated exhibits the object of a publication. This specific branch of the collection compiled by Helmut Klewan, which has continuously grown over the years, feeds on the polarities within it, on the collector’s unconventional way of thinking and tenacity, as well as on his love for artists and authors.”

Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Director of the Leopold Museum

The exhibition

The exhibition’s curator, the author Stefan Kutzenberger, selected some 230 works for the presentation. The exhibition, with its tight hanging of works, exposes surprising interconnections between literature and the fine arts, playfully weaving a net between centuries, continents and art disciplines. The exhibition’s title The Gaze from the Frame refers both to the eye contact of the depicted with beholders and to the art collector Helmut Klewan’s expert eye which allows him to see the bigger picture. Artists like Max Beckmann, Lovis Corinth, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka, Emil Orlik, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin and Félix Vallotton exploited the riches of literary history, capturing close friends or literary heroes on paper or canvas, allowing for glimpses into fictitious worlds behind the portrayed heads and primarily revealing the profound respect between book and image. It becomes apparent that literature and the fine arts cannot but overcome borders and make the world larger rather than smaller.

“Since the times of Homer, we as readers have wanted to assign faces to figures in an attempt to come a little closer to solving the mystery of literature. However, like then, the image of authorship continues to exist only in our imagination and is thus very close to the realm of the visual arts. It is not surprising, then, that the tireless reader and art collector Helmut Klewan was gripped by the fascinating genre of writers’ portraits.”

Stefan Kutzenberger, curator of the exhibition

The portrait of an author created by an artist is “doubly fortunate”, as Helmut Klewan put it, since “you kill two birds with one stone”. This double legibility of writers’ portraits is the focus of the exhibition. “Since literature should not be compartmentalized, our attempt at a structure is nothing but a makeshift solution. For literature can never be clearly assigned to countries, languages, eras or categories of genre and gender”, as Stefan Kutzenberger explains.

 

Helmut Klewan: gallery owner – collector – patron

After completing a bookseller’s apprenticeship and attending art history lectures given by the eminent art historians Otto Pächt, Otto Demus and Fritz Novotny, Helmut Klewan joined the art trade. His encounter with the oeuvre of Arnulf Rainer – whom he met as a fellow art trader specializing in Jugendstil – made a lasting impression on him. Among Klewan’s most important clients was the collector and later museum founder Rudolf Leopold who acquired works by Tina Blau, Carl Moll, Klimt, Schiele, Kubin and Egger-Lienz from Klewan. Following his beginnings in Vienna, where he founded a gallery on Dorotheergasse in 1970, Helmut Klewan opened a branch in Munich in the 1970s. At these premises on Maximilianstraße, Klewan realized 67 presentations, continuing his exhibition program from 1991 at the Großes Galeriehaus on Gärtnerplatz with a further 74 successful exhibitions, before he retired from his career as a gallery owner in 1999.

 

Alongside large groups of works by specific artists, for instance by Maria Lassnig and Alberto Giacometti, Helmut Klewan’s collection ranges from sculptures, objects of everyday culture, such as signboards, all the way to salon paintings. Time and again, he provided works from his rich collection as loans for international exhibitions, while many presentations were made up entirely of works from his compilation.

 

“Helmut Klewan practices a type of collecting that defies rigid lines between art-historical eras and traditional genre designations. In doing so, he opens up different, fruitful approaches to art which contrast pleasantly with conventional collecting strategies.” Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Director of the Leopold Museum

 

The exhibition opening

The exhibition was opened with speeches by curator Stefan Kutzenberger and the Leopold Museum’s Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger who paid tribute to the collector and patron Helmut Klewan. Guests visiting the "Klewan Collection" donation included the chairman of the Leopold Museum’s Board of Directors Josef Ostermayer, the collector and museum co-founder Elisabeth Leopold, Leopold Museum board member Saskia Leopold, the Director of the Sigmund Freud Museum Monika Pessler, the artists Isolde Ohlbaum, Ulysses Belz, Johanna Freisl, Regina Goetz and Peter Sengl, the literary scholar and contributor to the catalogue Norbert Bachleitner, crime writer Christian Klinger, the poet Verena Stauffer, writers Tanja Paar and Martina Schmidt, Sylvia Eisenburger-Kunz, Ursula Rohringer (Dorotheum), collector Waltraud Leopold, gallery owner Vincenzo della Corte, PR expert Harriet Haupt-Stummer, collector Edith Raidl, and many others.

The Gaze from the Frame. The “Klewan Collection” Donation

6^th May–29^th Aug. 2022 | Level -2

CATALOGUE ACCOMPANYING THE EXHIBITION

The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue in German: Der Blick aus dem Rahmen. Literarische Porträts aus der Sammlung Klewan, edited by Hans-Peter Wipplinger and Stefan Kutzenberger, with essays by Norbert Bachleitner, Stefan Kutzenberger, Helmut Klewan, Christiane Lange and Hans-Peter Wipplinger, available at the Leopold Museum Shop: www.leopoldmuseum.org/shop

Link for Presseunterlagen / Pressebildern

For further images, please visit APA-Fotogalerie.

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