向日葵

Gustav Klimt spent his summers at the Attersee, a lake in the Austrian Alps, where he painted gardens and water away from Vienna. Out of one of those gardens came this single sunflower, standing head and shoulders above a dense crowd of smaller blooms that pile up around its stem like a gown. A Viennese critic, seeing it in 1907, described the flower as a robed figure trembling with feeling, and once you read it that way the human shape is hard to unsee. Klimt made it the same year he was finishing The Kiss, deep in his gold period, and the two share the same instinct: a single upright form wrapped in ornament. He painted it a metre square, the flower filling almost the whole canvas.