Litzlbergkeller

Almost every summer for years, Gustav Klimt left Vienna for the Attersee, a long lake in the Austrian Salzkammergut, to paint landscapes in a private square format quite unlike his gilded portraits. This one looks straight at the Litzlberger Keller, a lakeside beer garden, from so close and so level that Klimt almost certainly worked from a boat. He empties it of people entirely and lets the building, the water and the bushes flatten into a single mosaic of yellows, greens and mauve. It was made in 1915 and 1916, during the war, on commission from the industrialist Otto Primavesi. The same handful of colours turns up everywhere, the white of the walls reappearing in the flowers along the shore, so the whole surface reads as one woven field.