IX. The Attersee: the landscapes

A quarter of Klimt's painted œuvre — some fifty-odd pictures — are landscapes, and they are the least-known and, to many painters, the most beautiful part of his work. Almost all were painted in the summers, which Klimt spent from 1900 onward at the Attersee, the lake in the Salzkammergut, with Emilie Flöge and her family; there, away from Vienna and the portrait commissions and the scandals, he painted the water, the woods, the meadows, the farmhouses and the flower-gardens, in square canvases of a dense, all-over, patterned surface that translates the golden style into nature.

The landscapes have no people. They are close-up and flat: Klimt used a telescope or opera-glass to crop the view, bringing the far shore or the orchard up to the picture plane and eliminating the sky, so that the canvas becomes a shimmering mosaic of leaves, blossoms, reflections and fields — The Pear Tree, The Birch Wood, Apple Tree I, Rosebushes under the Trees, the Farmhouse and Schloss Kammer series, Poppy Field, The Park. The pointillé dab of the trees, the flattened water, the field of flowers dissolved into pattern: the landscapes apply to nature the same dissolution of the object into decorative surface that the portraits apply to the woman, and they are, in their quiet way, as radical. They are also the pictures in which Klimt is happiest — no femme fatale, no death, no gold, only the summer lake and the flowering meadow, painted with a serene and total attention.

The square canvas and the cropped view

The landscapes' form is as radical as the portraits'. Almost all are square — a format Klimt reserved for them — and almost all are seen close and cropped, the middle distance eliminated so that the far shore, the orchard or the flower-bank is brought flat against the picture plane; Klimt is said to have used a viewfinder or opera-glass to isolate the motif. The sky is usually excluded; the water has no horizon; the field of leaves or blossoms or reflections fills the whole square in an even, all-over texture that anticipates, in its flatness and its rejection of the single focal point, the concerns of later abstraction. The dab of paint that makes the foliage — a pointillé learned in part from the Neo-Impressionists Klimt saw at the Secession — builds a shimmering mosaic of colour, the vegetal equivalent of the gold ground. The landscapes were bought by the same patrons as the portraits and hung in the same Viennese drawing-rooms, and they are, increasingly, the part of the œuvre that painters most admire: Klimt with the anxiety and the eroticism set aside, pure surface and pure summer, the Attersee dissolved into pattern.

X. Life, death, and the private man

The man behind the pictures is famously hidden. Klimt left almost no letters of substance, gave almost no interviews, and wrote, once, the sentence that is his whole self-account: 'I have never painted a self-portrait. I am less interested in myself as a subject for painting than I am in other people, above all women... Whoever wants to know something about me — as an artist, the only notable thing — ought to look carefully at my pictures.' He never married. He lived with his mother and sisters until his mother's death, and was the lifelong companion — probably not the lover, in the ordinary sense — of Emilie Flöge, the fashion designer, whom he called for on his deathbed. He fathered at least fourteen children by various models and lovers, acknowledged some, supported some, and kept his domestic and his erotic lives rigorously separate and private. He was a big, bearded, powerful, taciturn, sensual man who wore a long smock and sandals in the studio and nothing beneath, kept cats, ate large breakfasts, worked with total discipline, and said little.

He was also generous to the young. He recognised the talent of Egon Schiele, twenty-eight years his junior, and of Oskar Kokoschka, promoted them, exhibited them, gave Schiele his models and his encouragement — 'Klimt has talent,' Schiele reported him saying, and the older man's blessing launched the younger. The two generations — Klimt's decorative symbolism and the raw Expressionism of Schiele and Kokoschka — are the two faces of Viennese modernism, and Klimt, the father, held them together.

Klimt's generosity to the young was of a piece with his character — the taciturn, powerful, unliterary man who said little and gave much. He chaired the Kunstschau of 1908 that gave Kokoschka an early showing, and he lent Schiele models and money and traded drawings with him. The line from The Kiss to Schiele's tormented lovers is direct and a break at once: the younger men kept Klimt's subject — the body, sex, death — and stripped away the gold, replacing the beautiful surface with the flayed nerve. That both modes were born in the same decade, in the same city, and that the older man fostered the younger, is the measure of Vienna 1900's density.

The end came with the age. On 11 January 1918 Klimt suffered a stroke that paralysed his right side; he was taken to hospital, caught the influenza then sweeping a war-exhausted Europe, and died on 6 February 1918, at fifty-five. His studio held many unfinished pictures — the late portraits and allegories, some of the finest things he made, left with the faces done and the fields of colour half-laid. Egon Schiele drew him on his deathbed. Nine months later Schiele himself was dead of the same influenza, at twenty-eight; and three days after Schiele died, the Habsburg empire whose gilded, anxious, doomed image Klimt had painted for thirty years dissolved forever. The gold and the abyss, which had been the subject of the pictures, had become the history of the world.