Birch Forest

The Klimt most people picture is all gold leaf and Viennese portraits. But nearly every summer he left the city for Lake Attersee in the Austrian mountains, and there he painted landscapes, dozens of them, on square canvases. He is said to have walked out into the woods early each morning to work. This birch forest is built almost entirely of trunks and fallen autumn leaves, the ground glowing reddish-gold, the view pushed right up flat against the trees with no sky and no horizon to escape to. It is 1903, a few years before his gilded portraits made him famous. The eye is left to wander among the pale trunks with nowhere in particular to land.