Broncia Koller-Pinell
1863–1934 · Austria–Hungary, Austria · Vienna Secession, Art Nouveau
The story
The Harvest was painted in 1908, the year Gustav Klimt and the architect Josef Hoffmann staged the Kunstschau, their large Vienna exhibition of modern art, and Broncia Koller-Pinell was one of the few women who showed there. In the picture the farm workers and the haystacks lock together into an ornamental pattern, close to the flat, decorative manner of Klimt's circle.
She was born Bronislawa Pineles in 1863 into a Jewish family in Sanok, in Galicia, now part of Poland. In 1888 she went to Munich to study at a private painting academy for women, since the official academies did not admit them, and in 1896 she married Hugo Koller, a physicist and physician. The couple's country house at Oberwaltersdorf, a village south of Vienna, was furnished by Hoffmann and the designer Koloman Moser.
In 1918 she became friends with the young Egon Schiele, who painted a portrait of Hugo Koller that year, now also in the Belvedere. The friendship lasted only months, because Schiele died in the influenza epidemic that autumn. She died in 1934, and the Belvedere gave her a solo exhibition in 2024.
