GUSTAV KLIMT’S LANDSCAPES

Rose, 1904, Paris, Musée d’Orsay.

Der Park, 1910, New York, Museum of Modern Art.

Tannenwald I, 1901, Zug, Kunsthaus.

Buchenwald I, 1902, Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlung.

Birnbaum, 1903, Cambridge, Fogg Art Museum, Haward University.

Bauernhaus in Buchberg, 1911, Vienna, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere.

Bauernhaus mit Birken, 1900, Private Collection.

Birkenwald I, 1903, Private Collection.

Obstbäume, 1901, Private Collection.

Lakeside with Birch Trees, 1901

Bauerngarten mit Kruzifix (1911)

In the summer of 1986, the Museum of Modern Art mounted the Vienna 1900 exhibition and acquired Gustav Klimt’s Hope II (1902), thereby admitting Klimt and his Zeitalter into the official canon of modern art. Despite this belated acknowledgement, and setting aside for a moment his fervent participation in the Wiener Secession (“Der Zeit Ihre Kunst und Der Kunst Ihre Freiheit”), Klimt still looks very much like a late 19th-century artist working in a conservative center at the edges of Europe that valued historicism, eclecticism and high-gloss academic finish. In his early work from the 1890s, he changes styles depending on the job—meticulous, hard-edged idealization for official public commissions like the Kunsthistorisches Museum vestibule murals, to gauzy, soft-focus late Impressionism for portraits and landscapes to murky Symbolist topoi executed in a slick,Jugendstil serpentine manner.

This isn’t quite the eclecticism of the Ringstraße, that schizophrenic collection of revival-styles emblematizing the problem of 19th-century historical self-consciousness in general, which the Secession categorically opposed. Klimt’s eclecticism consists of an ability to inhabit fully and to replicate perfectly a range of styles, each closely associated with other, usually French, painters, without privileging one over the other. This nearly post-modern agnosticism is most visible in Klimt’s landscapes, a genre in which he worked throughout his career. Here, his palette of styles ranges from plein air Impressionism and, more specifically, Monet’s Nymphéas, to the pointillism or Seurat and Pissarro to the expressionism of Van Gogh. It’s not hard to see why Klimt worked this way—each mode has its own gorgeous effects and, is suited to particular landscape sub-genres and his technical mastery of all of them is breathtaking.

The overall application of uniform, atomized, pin-points of pigment to the picture plane in representations of trees—Rose, Birnbaum and, most winningly, in Der Park—is the closest Klimt gets to a modernist concern. This exploration of surface effects on differs considerably from the broadly applied decorative patterning seen in the golden paintings, which in its derivation from Byzantine mosaics, is another example of eclectic historicism. His landscapes are also free of the lurid, psycho-sexual heavy-breathing of the golden paintings and other Symbolist-inflected works, which, ironically, makes them seems more modernist than the works he himself would have considered his most avant garde.

NO WHERE THERE: Abstract Landscapes

Jasper Johns, Grey Map, 1964, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art

Helen Frankenthaler, Basque Beach, 1957, Washington DC, National Gallery of Art

Ed Ruscha, Sepulveda and Pico, 2003.

Roy Lichtenstein, Eventide (Landscape), 1964, Private Collection

Franz Kline, Mahoning, 1956, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art

Willem De Kooning, Villa Borghese, 1960, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #39, 1975, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Frank Stella, Delaware Crossing, 1967, Private Collection

Helen Lundeberg, Landscape, 1962

“What you see is what you see,” Frank Stella once said of his paintings, meaning they referred to nothing outside of themselves and represented nothing beyond pigment and canvas. Yet many of Stella’s paintings were named after places, local and far afield—Firuzabad and Delaware Crossing (NJ), Gran Cairo and Telluride. This seeming contradiction is not unique to Stella—many artists of the post-war period who worked in an exclusively abstract mode, allude to locations, places, or geographies in the titles of their works. These range from geographically-specific sites (Mahoning, Villa Borghese), to more generic typologies of place (Basque Beach) and topographical features (Mountains and Sea). These works are non-figural, and as such, they do not accord with the art historical genre “landscape,” at least not in the traditional sense.

Are these evocations of place, in fact, equivocations—a reluctance to commit to absolute abstraction, or do titles like Basque Beach amount to a personal association imposed on an painted surface that has no necessary relationship to an actual or conceptual place? To put it more crudely, is there a where there?

While they are clearly not engaged in empirical description or mapping, certain abstract paintings seem to follow the contours of places alluded to in titles or be guided in their formal choices by qualities observed at those places. For example, the high-key palette, overall bright tonality, and wave-like forms of Helen Frankenthaler’s Basque Beach would seem to permit of a quasi-figurative reading of the work. Speaking about her breakthrough work, Mountains and Sea (1952) Frankenthaler parsed the picture’s representational and abstract qualities:

I painted Mountains and Sea after seeing the cliffs of Nova Scotia. It’s a hilly landscape with wild surf rolling against the rocks. Though it was painted in a windowless loft, the memory of the landscape is in the painting, but it has also equal amounts of Cubism, Pollock, Kandinsky, Gorky.

Elsewhere she referred to her paintings as “abstract climates.”

DeKooning described the large paintings he made in the late 1950s bearing place names like Merritt Parkway and Parc Rosenberg as “emotions:”

The pictures (I have) done since the ‘Women’, they’re emotions, most of them. Most of them are landscapes and highways and sensations of that, outside the city – with the feeling of going to the city or coming from it.

For both Frankenthaler and DeKooning, abstraction may mean non-representational, but it doesn’t mean evacuated of memory. The registration of memory, like the gestural brushstroke, is a relic of the artist’s interaction with the canvas, and not a form of “meaning” imposed from without.

In 1965, both Helen Lundeberg and Roy Lichtenstein painted pictures that they referred to as landscapes, but which bordered on abstraction. By calling her radically-simplified , yet figurative picture Landscape, Lundeberg uses the term to suggest an elemental distillation or essence of place. Lichtenstein’s picture is predictably trickier; an image of the horizon executed in benday dots and cropped in such a way that it verges on Rothko-like abstraction, it clearly invokes “landscape” as a meta-category, (like his contemporary images of ruins and brushstrokes) from an ironic distance.

If traditional landscape painting was in some meaningful sense involved with a descriptive or empirical mapping of place, then to what extent can pictures of maps be considered abstract landscapes? Jasper Johns’ recreation of a map retains the form of the visual artefact on which it is based and the stenciled labels are correctly applied, but a cloud of abstract-expressionist brushwork undermines the purpose of the original by reducing it to a merely optical experience. Ed Ruscha proposes a similar conundrum with less Wittgenstein und Drang when he offers us two street names and no other points of reference as either a “view” of L.A. or a detail of a map.