Klimt ceiling paintings on display in Vienna theater’s daily scaffolding tours

VIENNA (AP) — For more than a century, only conservators and experts could catch a close-up glimpse of early works by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt in Vienna, but Klimt fans are now getting that opportunity on daily guided tours high up on scaffolding.

The 10 oil paintings, which are on the 18-meter-high (60-foot-high) ceilings of the renowned Burgtheater in Austria’s capital, are being restored because of water damage.

“The special thing about Klimt for me at least is that we only know about his later works,” said Hannes Höllinger, 60, who went on one of the recent Klimt tours and said it “was very interesting to see that already at age 24 he made these very beautiful paintings which I myself had not seen before.”

Klimt, famed for his bold, daring art nouveau paintings, was a key figure in artistic modernism at the start of the 20th century. His work has fetched some of the highest prices for any artist. Among his most famous paintings is “The Kiss” from 1907-1908, which shows a couple in a passionate embrace adorned with elaborate patterns and gold. The painting is on display at Vienna's Belvedere Museum.

“We were allowed to invest several hundred thousand euros to let Gustav Klimt shine in his original splendor again,” Burgtheater commercial director Robert Beutler told The Associated Press. “Everything gets cleaned by hand with very fine cotton swabs and condensed water.”

The biggest Klimt painting is about 35 square meters (375 square feet), “so you can imagine how long that takes when you remove dust and grime piece by piece and layer by layer,” Beutler said.

Klimt painted the art at the theater from 1886-1888, together with his brother Ernst and Austrian painter Franz Matsch. At age 24, it was Klimt's first big commission.

Conservator Thomas Mahr, who is responsible for restoring the stucco surrounding Klimt’s early work, said the artists' pitch at the time was “'we are young, we are fast, and provide great work at low cost' — and that’s how they got into business."

The paintings depict different scenes from theater history. One of the biggest works displays a scene from 16th-century London, in which Queen Elizabeth I is shown watching a staging of “Romeo and Juliet” at the Globe Theatre. Right behind the queen, Klimt and his two fellow artists look on. It is Klimt's only known self-portrait.

Every day, hundreds of art lovers climb the scaffolding as part of guided tours to view Klimt’s work up close. Susanne Höllinger, who took the tour with her husband Hannes, said the early paintings already offer an idea of what Klimt's most famous later paintings would look like.

She especially enjoyed looking at the many details of the paintings that aren't visible from the floor of the theater such as finely painted, small figures or the cigarette in the fingers of Klimt’s chain-smoking brother Ernst.

“To be so close to these freshly renovated paintings — just a unique experience,” Höllinger exclaimed.

The special guided tours about Klimt's ceiling art will continue until August, after which the scaffolding will be removed. General admission tickets are available on the theater's website for 25 euros ($29).