Beech Forest I

Today we present the last painting from our special month with the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden's collection. (Also today is the last day of our -25% presale of DailyArt 2024 Calendars; don't miss them!)

Gustav Klimt, whose paintings of women are exemplary for Secessionist Vienna at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, found his way to landscape painting late in life. During his summer stays in Seewalchen am Attersee from 1898, he also painted, according to his own account, a "small beech forest (in sunshine) with a few conifers mixed in.". The artist built a viewfinder with a square cut-out from cardboard and placed it in front of the eye in such a way that the sky and horizon were almost left out.

The viewer's gaze finds no vanishing point in the balanced composition of Beech Forest I. A precisely captured stand of young trees (probably birches and aspens) stretches from the high horizon towards the viewer. Light falls on the foliage, which is rendered in the brush strokes and dabs typical of the Impressionists. The paint is applied thinly, the tonal values are balanced and contrasts of chiaroscuro are avoided. Thus the whole picture appears delicate. The mineral shimmering foliage, the blotchy tree bark, and the playful sun spots become an ornament covering the entire surface.

With his fir forest pictures of 1901, which already had the parallel rhythm of the tree trunks as their theme, Klimt was still following on from the symbolically charged atmospheric landscapes that were typical at the turn of the century. In Beech Forest I he is now so close to nature that the will to stylize and experiment is subordinated to the magic of what he sees.

P.S. Everybody knows The Kiss and The Woman in Gold. But we bet you don't know these amazing Klimt portraits, nor his absolutely unique paintings of trees!

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