About this work
What arrests the eye first is not a vista but a wall — a dense, shimmering curtain of foliage that fills nearly the entire canvas. Dense, tapestry-like foliage covers the majority of the picture surface, leaving only a narrow lower section with tree trunks, grass, and a clipped hedge. Those thin anchors at the bottom are everything: without them, the rest of the composition — a mosaic of green, blue, and yellow spots of similar size — is, to all intents and purposes, an abstract composition.
A notable characteristic of the painting is Klimt's use of speckled colour, which creates an almost pointillist effect — a relentless, hypnotic rhythm in which the naturalistic elements are offset by a decorative mosaic of blue, green, and yellow dots, rendered representational only with the aid of the work's lower section.
Executed in oil on canvas, the painting measures a perfectly square 110 × 110 cm — a format Klimt returned to again and again, and one that here amplifies the sense of enclosure, as though nature has sealed itself shut around the viewer.
*The Park* was painted between the summer of 1909 and its first exhibition in April 1910, left undated by Klimt himself.
In it, Klimt depicts a stand of trees in the grounds of Schloss Kammer on the Attersee, where he spent his summer holidays and developed his landscape painting.
Forming the core of a remarkable Schloss Kammer series dating from 1908 to 1914, these canvases are generally more thickly painted than Klimt's previous landscapes, with a renewed interest in strong contrasts.
By 1910, there is a push-pull in Klimt's work between increasingly expressive paint application and synthetic pictorial construction — and *The Park* sits at that exact tension point. It was first exhibited at the Ninth Venice Biennale in 1910, and also shown at the 1911 International Exhibition of Art in Rome and at the 1917 Austrian Art Exhibition in Stockholm, confirming its standing as one of the most ambitious works of his landscape practice. The painting is now held in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
As a print, *The Park* suits spaces that reward long looking — a study, a reading room, or a hallway where natural light can activate its greens and yellows at different hours. This is a visually demanding work, and possibly one of Klimt's finest plein air paintings — but its demands are quietly pleasurable rather
