The Park 1909–1910 CE

A curtain of leaves fills nearly the entire canvas, so dense that the painting first reads as a shimmering mosaic rather than a park. Only at the very bottom do tree trunks, a sliver of grass, a clipped hedge, and a lonely bench appear, as if the forest were slowly closing over the last traces of human presence. Gustav Klimt painted The Park around 1909–1910 on the landward side of Schloss Kammer beside Lake Attersee. The square oil on canvas now belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where its almost abstract foliage still startles viewers who expect the gold and erotic symbolism of his better-known portraits.

A summer that turned a park into a wall of color

Klimt left the canvas undated, yet its history can be pinned down with unusual precision. He worked on it during the summer of 1909 and showed it for the first time at the Ninth Venice Biennale in April 1910. By then he had already spent several seasons on the Attersee with Emilie Flöge and her family, first at Litzlberg and later at Villa Oleander in Kammer-Schörfling. From the villa he could look across the water toward Schloss Kammer, a modest baroque castle on a peninsula. The Park records a stand of trees inside the castle grounds on the landward side rather than the familiar lake view.

After public controversy over his University of Vienna ceiling paintings, Klimt painted landscapes largely for himself. They were not commissions. He rowed out on the lake, walked the park paths, and used a homemade viewfinder—a piece of cardboard with a square hole—to isolate the exact fragment of nature he wanted. The resulting pictures, including The Park, belong to a group of roughly fifty landscapes, more than forty of them inspired by the Attersee region. 

The viewfinder, the empty bench, and a varnish that changed the weather

Klimt’s working method supplies the most vivid details. He cut a square window in cardboard and held it up to the trees so that the composition would already be cropped and flattened before a single brushstroke touched the canvas. Tiny, directional strokes built the foliage; the lower strip of trunks and grass was what kept the whole from dissolving into pure pattern. A metal bench sits at the lower right, theoretically a place to rest, yet no figure occupies it. The leaves seem ready to swallow both the bench and anyone who might sit there.

Later conservation notes add another twist. A subsequent layer of varnish altered the original coloring and atmosphere, so the painting we see today is slightly different from the one Klimt finished. Scholars have also pointed out that a glimpse of the Attersee may be visible through the trunks, though the lake itself is almost entirely denied. These small facts—the cardboard square, the unused bench, the darkened varnish—turn a decorative landscape into something more personal.

Nature as tapestry, nature as a force that will not be tamed

Within Klimt’s oeuvre the painting occupies a special place. His golden portraits and allegorical figures made him famous; the landscapes, painted for pleasure during the “Sommerfrische”, were long underappreciated. The Park pushes that private genre to an extreme. Nine-tenths of the surface is an undifferentiated, tapestry-like mass of green, yellow, and blue dots. Only the narrow band at the bottom restores a sense of ground and space. The effect has been compared both to pointillism and to Byzantine mosaic, yet Klimt was not chasing optical science. He wanted ornament that still described a real place.

Critics have read the descending curtain of leaves as a modern version of the Romantic sublime: nature remains more powerful than the park bench designed to enjoy it. Others, drawing on Freudian ideas, find a quiet anxiety in the thicket and the uncertain depth. Either way, the work sits at a hinge in Klimt’s late style. It keeps the decorative flatness of Art Nouveau and Symbolism while edging toward abstraction years before that word became common. It also reminds us that the same artist who wrapped lovers in gold could spend a summer staring at trees until they became a wall.

Oil, a perfect square, and thousands of tiny strokes

The painting is oil on canvas and measures 110.4 by 110.4 centimeters, or 43½ by 43½ inches. The square format was deliberate; Klimt used it for many Attersee landscapes so that the image would feel self-contained and ornamental rather than panoramic. He built the foliage with countless small brushstrokes of similar size, varying their direction to create a flickering surface. The lower zone—trunks, grass, hedge, bench—is painted with slightly more descriptive care, just enough to anchor the mosaic above. 

From the artist’s studio to Emilie Flöge and finally to New York

After Klimt died in 1918 the painting stayed in his studio and then passed to Emilie Flöge, his lifelong companion. In 1928 the Neue Galerie in Vienna acquired it from her. By 1939 it was with Otto Kallir’s Galerie St. Etienne in Paris; the gallery relocated to New York the following year. The Museum of Modern Art purchased the work from Kallir in 1957, making it the first significant Klimt painting to enter an American public collection at a time when the artist was still little known in the United States. In 1978 MoMA briefly sold it to the Serge Sabarsky Gallery and then bought it back the same year. It remains at MoMA today, frequently on view and one of the museum’s most popular pictures.