Gustav Klimt in the woods, circa 1909. Photo by Pauline Hamilton.
By Rachel McGarry //
Gustav Klimt liked to vacation along the Attersee, a picturesque lake east of Salzburg, near the Austrian Alps. For Klimt, who spent most of his time painting in Vienna, these forays into nature were restorative. He rose early and painted into the evening, stopping at intervals to eat, swim, nap, or row. The locals who saw him wandering the woods or lakeshore dressed in his long blue painting smock called him Waldschrat, or forest demon.
It was on one of these vacations, in 1903, that Klimt painted his spellbinding Birch Forest, on view through September 18 in Mia’s Target Galleries as part of the exhibition “Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection.” Like the Klimt canvas, most of the works in the show are summer scenes, and many were inspired by travel—to Venice, the Grand Canyon, Cape Cod, or an outing to the woods or seashore. Something about summertime and vacations has inspired artists for centuries. The break in routine, the exhilaration of seeing new scenery, the unfamiliar light and novel sounds and smells, or just the simple relaxation of it all, awakens the senses and nourishes creativity.
Gustav Klimt’s Birch Forest painting, from 1903, in its full square format.
For Klimt, summer vacations to the Attersee offered a respite not only from city life but also the grind of portrait commissions, the lucrative enterprise that made him famous while consuming his time and artistic energy. Landscape painting was an escape from all that and became an important subject in the last 20 years of his life, from about 1897 to 1917, the year before he died of a stroke at age 55. So productive were these summers, that landscape painting—despite being a belated interest—came to represent a quarter of Klimt’s completed paintings.
The dense surface of his landscapes—Birch Forest is a lively mosaic of brushwork comprising tens of thousands of strokes—suggests that while Klimt may have begun painting the works in nature, he likely finished them indoors. He favored square canvases for his landscape paintings, a radical break with the age-old horizontal or “landscape” format, and he often used a piece of cardboard (later a plate of ivory) with a square cut-out to frame the scene he wanted to paint. The effect is an enclosed, focused view of nature, rather than a panoramic vista. Instead of standing at a distance, viewers are transported to the middle of a lake, a forest, or a field of flowers.
Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, oil, silver, and gold leaf on canvas, Neue Galerie New York. Acquired through the generosity of Ronald S. Lauder, the heirs of the Estates of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer, and the Estée Lauder Fund
As recently as 2006, Birch Forest was hanging in Vienna’s Belvedere museum. It had been looted by the Nazis from the illustrious Bloch-Bauer family during World War II, along with several other Klimt paintings, including his famous Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907)—the subject of last year’s Hollywood hit Woman in Gold, starring Helen Mirren. The movie and the book that inspired it, Anne-Marie O’Connor’s Lady in Gold (2012), tell the extraordinary story of the confiscation of the paintings as Jewish property, the Austrian museum’s refusal to return them for more than 60 years, and the drawn-out restitution case, which ultimately prevailed in the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Palais Bloch-Bauer, 18 Elisabethstrasse, Vienna—the home of Adele and Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer and their paintings by Klimt, including Birch Forest (1903) and Portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer I (1907). The property and paintings were confiscated by the Nazis during World War II.
The Bloch-Bauers had been great friends and supporters of Gustav Klimt and owned seven of his paintings—including four landscapes. Adele (1881–1925), the beauty immortalized by Klimt in his famous golden portrait had died long before the outbreak of World War II, but her husband, Ferdinand (1864–1945), had been forced to flee Vienna in 1938 and leave everything behind—his townhouse, his sugar factory, and his beloved Klimt paintings. From his exile in Switzerland, he held out hope to retrieve at least the two portraits of his dead wife. But he died soon after the war ended, having failed to win back his possessions or his home, which had become a railway office.
Nazi-looted art stored at Schlosskirche, Ellingen, in Germany.
Maria Altmann (1916–2011), Adele’s niece, had also fled Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1938, when her husband was released from the Dachau concentration camp. The couple settled in Los Angeles, where Altmann adjusted to a life very different from the privilege of her youth, raising four children and founding a successful clothing business. In the late 1990s, as Austria began to re-examine its Nazi past and new research emerged about the wills of Altmann’s aunt and uncle, she began to pursue her family’s paintings.
The case was settled in her favor in January 2006. Just two months later, five Klimt paintings were sent from Vienna to Los Angeles. Two others remained behind: a landscape, Schloss Kammer at Atersee III (1910), which Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer had donated to the Austrian gallery in 1936, and Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl (1917–18) a haunting, unfinished portrait of a woman later deported and killed by the Nazis at the Belzec death camp. Zuckerkandl’s heirs also claimed this painting.
Maria Altmann in front of the portrait of her aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, by Gustav Klimt, at an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2006, following the restitution of the Nazi-looted Klimts to the Bloch-Bauer heirs.
Once in Los Angeles the restituted Klimts were immediately exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Bloch-Bauer heirs decided to sell the works later that year and Klimt’s shimmering portrait of Adele was acquired by Ronald Lauder for the Neue Galerie in New York. The four other paintings were sold at auction and are now in private collections. This summer, as “Seeing Nature” features works from one of those private collections, the Paul G. Allen Family Collection, Mia offers a rare opportunity to see one of these dazzling Klimts.
Top image: Gustav Klimt, Birch Forest (detail), 1903, oil on canvas, The Paul G. Allen Family Collection