Klimt’s Tree Paintings
Though best known as a Symbolist for his portraits with burnished gold, Gustav Klimt’s landscapes were a big step toward ‘the Modern’.
For many, the name Gustav Klimt conjures imagery of figures engulfed by symbol-crammed patterns and loads of gold leaf that lends them the vibe of religious icons. Or sprawling architectural friezes packed with mythological narratives and allegorical motifs. Yet he was also an accomplished, and innovative, landscape painter...
Around the same time as Dutch painter, Piet Mondrian was exploring similar notions in his early tree paintings, Klimt was studying the rhythms and balances in nature that appealed to the human eye… and soul. Something about being in nature, surrounded by the sculpturally complex yet calming forms of trees, seemed good for everyone.
The silent stillness of a deep pine forest, its cool shade pierced by pin-points of sunlight, could stir the spirit as much as any great cathedral. Even in his faithful renderings of views within forests of tall, straight fir trees, Klimt manages to include some symbolism. The repeated trunks take the eye upward toward the unseen canopy and above that, the imagined heavens, the spiritual, the overwhelming brightness of the encompassing sky. Here, he seems to share the spiritual view…
