About Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt (14 July 1862 – 6 February 1918) was an Austrian Symbolist painter and a founding member of the Vienna Secession movement.
His work helped define the Art Nouveau style in Europe.
Born in Vienna into a lower middle-class family, his father Ernst worked as an engraver and goldsmith — a craft that would leave an unmistakable imprint on his son's aesthetic.
In 1876, Klimt earned a scholarship to the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, where he studied until 1883 and received training as an architectural painter.
His early work had a classical style typical of late 19th-century academic painting, as seen in his murals for the Vienna Burgtheater (1888) and on the staircase of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. That conventional success, however, proved to be a point of departure rather than a destination. In 1897, Klimt and a group of like-minded artists resigned from the Vienna Artists' Association and founded the Vienna Secession — a decisive break that freed him to pursue a radically personal visual language. Life, love, and death can be determined as the important themes of Klimt's work, pursued through roughly one large-format portrait of a woman per year, rendered in the Art Nouveau principles of flatness, decoration, and gold leaf, alongside allegories and Old Testament heroines transformed into dangerous femmes fatales.
During the early years of the Secessionist movement, Klimt began incorporating gold leaf into his paintings — the development that would define his so-called "Golden Phase," with *Pallas Athena* (1898) often considered its earliest example and *Judith I* (1901) another notable milestone.
In 1903, Klimt traveled to Ravenna, where he admired the Byzantine mosaics of the Basilica San Vitale — an influence unmistakable in the height of his Golden Phase, including *Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I* (1907) and *The Kiss* (1907–08).
*The Kiss* — depicting a man and woman locked in an embrace, created using oil paint and silver, gold, and platinum leaf to produce a shimmering, mosaic effect — is now held in
About this work
A narrow band of water runs across the lower register, and behind it the lakefront houses of Litzlberg rise in a dense, nearly vertiginous stack, set against the massive swell of a wooded hillside — with only a sliver of sky visible at the top right edge of the composition.
Klimt builds up his vision of the village through a bold mosaic of tessellated colours, the cool blues and greens of forest and water punctuated by the bright orange of the rooftops.
Strong outlines and geometric shapes — echoing the influence of Schiele's townscapes of Krumau — create an effect of flattening, producing a richly textured surface that nonetheless retains great depth through a subtle modulation of colour.
The buildings along the shore have been identified as the houses surrounding a local brewery and the Mayr farm. The result is less a landscape in the traditional sense than an architectural tapestry: dense, intimate, and almost entirely devoid of open sky.
Although the work has been historically dated to 1915, recent scholarship suggests Klimt probably painted it in the latter half of 1914, while at his studio in Vienna.
It is believed the composition is based on a bromide postcard of the Attersee lake that the artist had sent to his nephew on 13 August 1914.
Klimt and his companion Emilie Flöge spent the summer months of 1914 in Weissenbach on the south shore of the Attersee, returning there for the following two summers, usually staying between July and mid-September. The Attersee landscapes as a whole were produced for the artist's own pleasure during summer vacations — rare works that answered to no patron and no brief. In its surface patterning, *Litzlberg am Attersee* draws inspiration from folk tapestry and stained-glass window techniques that German and Austrian artists were keenly exploring in the early decades of the twentieth century. It also marks a key moment in Klimt's late style, as his paintings increasingly refused the rules of perspective — moving buildings closer together, flattening space, and transforming distances into surface.
Klimt preferred square canvases and used square viewfinders cut from cardboard to frame and compose his works — and that decisive format gives this print a meditative, self-contained quality on the wall. It rewards a room that already has some weight to it: a study lined with books, a dining room with warm wood tones, or a hallway where the deep greens and terracotta oranges can breathe against a pale or stone-coloured ground. It speaks to the viewer
