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ONLINECOLLECTION

Gustav Klimt, book ornamentation by Bertold Löffler, Vienna/Leipzig 1903, 45 pages, 1903

Leopold Museum,
Vienna
Leopold Museum,
Vienna
Color lithograph (book cover); letterpress
16×15.7×0.3 cm

Artists

  • Bertold Löffler

    (Nieder-Rosenthal [today: district of Liberec] 1874–1960 Vienna)

  • Felix Salten

    (Pest [today: Budapest] 1869–1945 Zurich)

Unfortunately not on display at the moment
The genre of advertising art was one of the core domains of the painter, graphic artist and designer Bertold Löffler (1874–1960). In 1903, he created the book ornamentation for this publication by the author Felix Salten (1869–1945) on the central figure of Viennese Jugendstil, Gustav Klimt (1862–1918). In keeping with the esthetic criteria of Viennese Jugendstil, the cover features exclusively geometrical decor. While the book’s format is a near square, Löffler drew the inner cartouche as a perfect square, accurate to the millimeter, in an allusion to the format of Klimt’s paintings. The framing of this cartouche corresponds to a picture frame, albeit an abstracted one. In the area of the cartouche, underneath a star and against a black background, Löffler placed the names of Salten and Klimt, the latter in a deliberate imitation of the way Klimt typically signed his paintings. Outside of this inner square, Löffler placed a square grid and positioned moss-green squares at the crossover points.

Object data

Artist/author
  • Design: Bertold Löffler
  • Author: Felix Salten
Title
Gustav Klimt, book ornamentation by Bertold Löffler, Vienna/Leipzig 1903, 45 pages
Date
1903
Art movement
Art Nouveau
Category
Book
Material​/technique
Color lithograph (book cover); letterpress
Dimensions
16×15.7×0.3 cm
Credit line
Leopold Museum, Vienna, Inv. 6126
Inventory access
Accession 2018
Keywords

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Provenance

Provenance research
Leopold Museum i

Dr. Joachim Bogner, Wien (bis 2018);
Leopold Museum-Privatstiftung, Wien (seit 2018). (1)

  1. Archiv des Leopold Museums, Rechnung vom 10.06.2018

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