Attersee

Klimt spent the summer of 1900 on the Attersee, a lake in the Austrian Alps, and painted it as almost nothing but water, a square canvas filled edge to edge with short green and gray waves, only a scrap of an island showing at the top right. That same year his ceiling paintings for the University of Vienna were drawing public outrage back in the city. Out here he answered to no committee and pushed a landscape as close to pure abstraction as he ever would. When it went on show at the Secession in 1901, the critic Ludwig Hevesi called it a frame full of lake water. It now hangs at the Leopold Museum in Vienna.