Vienna in the Berkshires. (Current and Coming).(Brief Article)

Under the rubric "the Vienna Project," eleven cultural institutions located in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts are sponsoring a series of events this summer that range from operatic, choral, and theatrical to film screenings and museum exhibitions. Two museums have organized shows that should be of interest to our readers.

The Viennese architect and designer Josef Hoffmann is one of the most important figures in European decorative arts of the early twentieth century. In 1899 he was a founder of the Vienna Secession, and in 1903 of the Wiener Werkstatte. An exhibition at the Clark Art Institute focuses on those of Hoffmann's affluent patrons who were members of the Wittgenstein family. Karl, the patriarch, and several of his eight children supported Hoffmann through their patronage between the late 1890s and about 1905. The exhibition, entitled Josef Hoffmann: The Homes of the Wittgensteins, includes some twenty pieces of furniture and silver as well as fifty drawings.

The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williams-town has four tightly focused loan exhibitions, all of which are on view through September 2. Gustav Klimt Landscapes includes fifteen paintings representative of this aspect of his work, which is largely unknown outside Austria. These jewellike canvases depict orchards, woods, gardens, and villas in the picturesque countryside around Attersee, a lake near Salzburg. Klimt frequently vacationed in this region, and painted a total of fifty-five landscapes between 1898 and his death in 1918. As one of the founders of the Secession movement, he was one of the most avant-garde painters in Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century when art and design flourished in the city. Klimt's earliest ...