The Coast near Concarneau

From 1893 on, Maximilian Kurzweil regularly spent the summer months in the picturesque Breton harbour town of Concarneau, where in 1895 he married Marthe Guyot, daughter of the deputy mayor. Influenced by French Impressionism and Pointillism, the artist created pictures of light-flooded landscapes with flickering water surfaces that celebrate light and colour as essential artistic parameters. Our large-format oil painting, which already prominently featured in the 1964 exhibition ‘Vienna around 1900’ in the Vienna Secession, fits perfectly into this genealogy. While Maximilian Kurzweil preferred the French Atlantic coast in the summer, Gustav Klimt favoured the Attersee (Lake Atter) in Upper Austria as his summer retreat.
As founding members of the Vienna Secession, both painters were significantly involved in exhibiting French artists in Vienna, and a clear preference for the square picture format is evident both in Kurzweil’s depiction of the coast at Concarneau and in Klimt’s earlier painting of the Attersee now to be found in Vienna’s Leopold Museum. Kurzweil and Klimt created dense, atmospheric, poetic landscape idylls with reflecting water surfaces that focus on the beauty of the landscape and negate any kind of human presence. In the case of Kurzweil, bizarre cloud formations can (still) be made out in the sky over the coast, while rays of sun break through the clouds, suffusing the water with a warm glow. Klimt, in contrast, dispensed with a defined foreground; the horizon is placed higher and the depiction borders on the abstract. From short, vigorous strokes of the brush in luminous colours, subtly modulated colour-carpets steer the viewer’s gaze over the endless expanse of water, suggesting majestic sublimity, and contemplative calm, too.