Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Gustav Klimt
Austrian; 20th-century
New York, NY: Neue Galerie
87%
Park at Kammer Castle. 1909. Oil on canvas
Much more significant than any of his gold-leaf constructions on canvas — whose unrivaled prettiness tends to mask, even to facilitate, a certain simplicity of structure and an unelaborated lack of dimensionality — this oil painting allows for Klimt's obsession with ornamented flatness to take on an aesthetically substantial character. In the gold-leaf paintings, whenever two expanses of decorated surface collide, they do so with a shocking degree of mutual ambivalence: there's hardly any figure or ground going on in these pictures; rather, there are floating planes of pattern that offer up discrete charms but little unified effect. But in this painting, that edifice of yellow and green is a spiral of the virtual and the real: it nearly bursts the picture plane it's so teeming with marks, but then the fast recession of foreground in front of it sets it far, far back in the composition. Within it, too, there's a carnival of differentiation and depth (look at that band of purplish foliage to the right of the main mass! look at the tree beside that!). There are, of course, Klimt's characteristic juxtapositions of differently adorned surfaces — the impasto of the ground before the trees; the long strokes of the reeds beside the water; the murky broadness of the top of the pond — but when they meet, they vie with each other. It's any such vying that Klimt's missing at his more florid. (TFS, 2025)