On Lake Attersee

Gustav Klimt

Oil on canvas

Leopold Museum

Painted during Klimt's first summer stay at Lake Attersee in 1900, this oil on canvas presents a radical, nearly abstract view of the water's surface. Almost the entire square canvas is consumed by turquoise, slightly undulating waves rendered as free-formed speckles that diminish in scale toward the upper edge, generating an illusion of depth; only the dark treetops of Litzlberg Island in the upper-right corner anchor the composition to recognizable reality. Gustav Klimt (1862–1918), a founding figure of the Vienna Secession and one of the foremost painters of Viennese Art Nouveau, created virtually his entire landscape oeuvre at the Attersee, working independently of commissions purely out of personal artistic drive. Considered the most abstract of all his landscape paintings, the work was enthusiastically received by critics when first exhibited at the 10th Vienna Secession Exhibition in 1901, and it remains a landmark in Klimt's career and in the broader history of early abstraction in European painting.