Gustav Klimt, Birch Forest, 1903. Oil on canvas. Paul G. Allen Collection. Public domain (artist died 1918); image via Wikimedia Commons.
Two weeks of this letter have covered a petition signed by eighty-seven professors, a painting the state bought before it was finished, and a family that lost a legal fight over another one entirely. None of that happened in summer. From around 1900 until his death in 1918, Klimt spent every summer at the Attersee, a lake in Austria's Salzkammergut region, and while he was there he painted almost nothing but trees, water, and gardens. No scandal followed him there. No committee objected. He simply left Vienna every June and came back in September with a stack of landscapes nobody was fighting about.
A square hole cut in a piece of cardboard
Klimt's landscapes look like nothing else in his catalogue, starting with their shape. Nearly every one is painted on a square canvas, a genuine break from the horizontal "landscape" format that had been standard for centuries. To find his compositions, he used a simple hand tool: a piece of cardboard, later a plate of ivory, with a square cut out of the center, which he held up to the view like a viewfinder and looked through until something inside the square held together on its own. Birch Forest, painted in 1903, is what that method produces at its most disciplined: a stand of pale trunks and a floor of fallen autumn leaves, rendered in small, dense strokes with no horizon, no sky, no human figure, no vanishing point pulling the eye toward any single destination. You are meant to stand in the middle of it and stop looking for the way out.
The part of the catalogue nobody argues about
Landscapes make up roughly a quarter of everything Klimt painted, and they are the quietest quarter by a wide margin. No gold leaf. No reclining women. No allegory requiring a committee to interpret it. Contemporaries described a man at the Attersee who kept a punishing routine even on vacation: awake at dawn, painting outdoors for hours before breakfast, swimming daily, mostly alone or with the extended family of his companion Emilie Flöge, deliberately avoiding the correspondence and social obligations that filled the rest of his year. The paintings show almost nobody. That absence was the whole point. A man whose Vienna work spent two decades being read, argued over, and occasionally banned spent his summers making pictures that asked to be looked at and nothing else.
The company he kept there
The Attersee summers were not solitary in the way the paintings might suggest. Klimt spent most of them with the extended family of Emilie Flöge, the designer and businesswoman who ran one of Vienna's most fashionable fashion salons and was his closest companion for the last decades of his life, a relationship photographs from the period document far more plainly than any letter does; the two of them were photographed together on the lake in matching reform dresses of Flöge's own design, informal and unposed in a way nothing from his Vienna career was allowed to be. He painted her sister's house, the family's garden, the boats on the water. The landscapes are not pictures of solitude so much as pictures made by someone temporarily released from an audience, still surrounded by people, just not by the people who wanted something from him.
The reflection worth sitting with
It's tempting to read the landscapes as a hidden, truer Klimt beneath the scandal, the real man once the audience left. That reading is probably too neat. The gold-leaf portraits and the birch forests are the same artist solving two different problems: one practice built for an audience that wanted to be provoked, prized, occasionally offended, and made an entire career out of that appetite; the other practice built for exactly one viewer, himself, standing at a lake with a square hole cut in a piece of cardboard, checking whether the arrangement in front of him held together without anyone else's opinion attached. Both were real. He just only let the public see one of them at a time.
Next issue
Last Sunday of the Klimt month: the golden portrait that left Vienna, the eighty-two-year-old who took a country to the United States Supreme Court to get it back, and where it hangs now.
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Gustav Klimt, Birch Forest, 1903. Oil on canvas. Paul G. Allen Collection. Public domain (artist died 1918); image via Wikimedia Commons.