Beech Grove II

Late in 1903 the Vienna Secession gave Klimt a one-man show, and most visitors came to argue over Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence, the huge canvases he had made for the ceiling of the University's Great Hall. The writer Hermann Bahr, one of his defenders, answered the hostile press by gathering its attacks into a pamphlet called Against Klimt. In the same rooms hung this quiet, square picture of a beech wood, probably painted near Litzlberg on the Attersee, where he spent his summers. It carries a second title, Beech, and one broad, blotched trunk does stand in the middle, ringed by thin stems over a floor of fallen leaves. It was among the works from that exhibition bought by private collectors, and its present whereabouts are not publicly known. The image here comes from an old black-and-white reproduction, so it gives no idea of the colours.