Birchwood

Birch Wood (Buchenwald) was painted by Gustav Klimt in 1901. While Klimt also started his golden period around this time, resulting in paintings like The Kiss and Adele Bloch-Bauer, he also produced paintings like this majestic depiction of a Birch Wood.

While devoid of the femme fatales and direct sensuality that have become Klimt’s trademark, Birch Wood nevertheless contains many trademark Klimt characteristics. We can thus see the upper parts of the tree trunks painted as if the consisting mainly of monotonously colored rectangles of different sizes. The leaves on the ground are meanwhile depicted in great detail, almost as if placed layered on the ground. These effects combine to give a layered feeling which in turn offers depth, a technique used extensively by Klimt in his work. The bottom of the tree trunks are meanwhile painted with numerous small shapes, in an almost foggy way alike to the background in e.g. The Kiss, another Klimt parallel.

Birch Wood by Gustav Klimt can today be seen at the Wolfgang-Gurlitt-Museum in Germany.