盛开的草地

Klimt spent his summers on the Attersee, a long lake in the Austrian Alps, and it was there, away from the gold portraits that made his name, that he painted flowers. This is a square of high meadow seen so close there is no sky, no horizon, nothing to stand on, just a rising field stippled with poppies and daisies. He liked to frame these scenes through a small viewfinder cut from cardboard, isolating a patch of green until it read almost as pattern. He showed landscapes like this at the Vienna Kunstschau of 1908, the big exhibition he organised that year. In 2025 this one sold at auction for 86 million dollars.