FEBRUARY: Vienna
No city has as many paintings by Gustav Klimt as Vienna, and the city will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the artist's birth with a year of exhibitions. The Kunsthistorisches Museum (www.khm.at), will host a major retrospective of works produced from 1886 to 1897 (14 February-6 May). And the Leopold Museum
(www.leopoldmuseum.org) will stage Gustav Klimt: A Journey Through Time (24 February-11 June), featuring not just pictures but also Klimt's travel diaries and artefacts and letters from the estate of Emilie Flöge, his muse and lifelong companion. The following month, the Albertina (www.albertina.at) will show a wide selection of its 170 Klimt drawings (14 March-10 June). And in May, the Wien Museum (www.wienmuseum.at) will put its entire Klimt archive of more than 400 paintings, drawings, sketches and posters on display for the first time. At the Belvedere (www.belvedere.at), which has the finest permanent collection of Klimts (not least The Kiss), there is currently a temporary show,Gustav Klimt/Josef Hoffmann: Pioneers of Modernism, which runs until 4 March. And later in the year Klimt exhibitions will follow at the Austrian Theatre Museum (from 10 May), the Folklore Museum (25 May) and the Künstlerhaus (6 July).
It's hard to escape the influence of the artist in Vienna. Even the city's newest hotel, the Sofitel Vienna Stephansdom (www.sofitel.com; doubles from €220), in the Jean Nouvel-designed Uniqa building on Praterstrasse, has decorative elements that recall Klimt's style, most strikingly in the extraordinary golden ceiling of its restaurant. Even if you don't stay there, the hotel is worth a look, with a façade clad in 45,000 tiny LED blocks that create an almost psychedelic light show after dark.
Pictured: The Kunsthistorisches Museum