Master of Movement: Vienna’s Belvedere Celebrates Kinetism Pioneer Erika Giovanna Klien

Whether it was a bird’s nosedive, the rotations of a food processor, or the rhythms of dancing bodies, for Erika Giovanna Klien (1900–1957), there was only one constant in art—movement. The Belvedere in Vienna is now presenting an impressive major exhibition dedicated to the Austrian-American artist and art educator in the Lower Belvedere. With around 300 exhibits, this is the most comprehensive showcase of her work to date.

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Although Klien is considered the most important representative of Viennese Kinetism, she is still regarded as an insider’s tip in the international art canon. Curator Verena Gamper hopes to change that for good with this exhibition: Klien’s work deserves “full recognition and greater visibility.”

The Poetry of Dynamics

Klien was particularly fascinated by the complex dynamics of flying birds. Right in the first exhibition room, visitors encounter 18 excerpts of works featuring this central motif from the years 1925 to 1957. The interplay impressively illustrates Klien’s artistic development: While the early works still reveal figurative elements, the motif dissolves in the 1950s into increasingly abstract, analytically geometric forms.

The centerpiece is Klien’s arguably most famous painting, “Diving Bird” (1939), which is otherwise part of the museum’s permanent collection and now shines as the highlight of the solo exhibition.

From the Classroom to the Avant-Garde

Klien’s distinctive style emerged at the Vienna School of Applied Arts in the class for ornamental form under Franz Cizek. The progressive educator advocated for the exploration of the “rhythmic existence of things.” Klien combined Expressionism, Cubism, and Futurism into her own kinetic visual language. She broke movement down into its individual physical components and reassembled them geometrically and rhythmically—as seen in works such as “Mixer” and “Meat Grinder” (both 1935).

Klien’s enormously broad range demonstrates that she remains artistically elusive. Under the influence of Rudolf von Larisch, she used writing as an independent visual medium, thereby exploring typography and the theory of writing. During her time as an art teacher in Salzburg-Kleßheim, she sent the humorous “Klessheimer Sendboten” to Vienna—a mixture of diary and fictional newspaper in which she portrayed herself as a chain-smoker with a self-deprecating sense of humor. In addition to marionette theater, Klien explored an electric light instrument for projecting moving stage sets as well as a political dance theater piece (“The Masses”), for which she composed the music herself.

Between New York and Education

In 1929, Klien emigrated to New York. Despite participating in the legendary International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum, she did not achieve a major commercial breakthrough in the U.S. Nevertheless, she continued to shape the art world primarily as an educational reformer: her writings reveal that, for her, creating art and teaching formed an inseparable whole.

After she died in 1957, Klien was by no means completely forgotten—she owes much of her current fame to the artist Bernhard Leitner and the gallery owner Michael Pabst, who brought her work back into the public eye beginning in the 1960s.

Museum Belvedere

Erika Giovanna Klien