Tate Liverpool to Stage Major Klimt Show

The work celebrates the unification of all the arts and is an example of the concept of the total work of art pioneered by Richard Wagner.

The Tate Liverpool gallery will stage a major show dedicated to Austrian artist Gustav Klimt, including a reconstruction of his monumental installation "The Beethoven Frieze" housed in the Vienna Secession building.

Billed as the first comprehensive Klimt exhibition to be held in Britain, the show will examine Klimt's role in the Secession movement, which inspired not only artists but architects, fashion designers and furniture makers.

The exhibition runs from May 30 to Aug. 31 and is part of Liverpool's programme as European Capital of Culture 2008.

Klimt created The Beethoven Frieze, which measures over 34 metres long, for the Secession's 14th exhibition in 1902.

It was originally meant to be destroyed after the show, but a patron of the Secession movement ordered it to be removed in seven pieces and stored.

It was sold to the Lederer family, which was dispossessed under the Nazis, and returned to them after World War Two. They sold the work to the Austrian state who restored the frieze after 1973.

The work celebrates the unification of all the arts and is an example of the concept of the total work of art pioneered by Richard Wagner.

As well as several major Klimt paintings, "Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life in Vienna 1900" will feature furniture, design, jewellery and fashion and examine the relationsip between fine and applied art at that time.