Forest of Beech Trees, 1902

After 1900 Klimt turned increasingly to landscape as a subject. Altogether he painted well over fifty of them, very few preparatory studies exist for these landscapes and it seems that he followed the Impressionist practice of painting outdoors and directly from the subject, usually during his summer holidays. Unlike Impressionist paintings of the 1870s, Klimt’s landscapes are far from being spontaneous transcriptions of what his eyes saw at a particular place and moment. In Klimt’s landscapes there is always a strong element of pattern-making abstraction. Beech Trees uses the device of a screen of tree trunks cropped at the top and bottom of the canvas, borrowed perhaps from Monet’s Poplar series, and that Monet himself had taken from Japanese wood block prints.