Gustav Klimt - Seeufer Mit Birken. Lakeshore With Birches 1901
Seeufer Mit Birken. Lakeshore With Birches 1901
90x90cm oil/canvas
Estimate: USD 9.5 - 12.7 million
Auction house: Sotheby’s, London
Sale date: 08 February 2012
Seller: Anonymous owner
Buyer: Anonymous buyer
From Sotheby’s, London:
This painting of haunting beauty, dating from the summer of 1901, stands at the very axis of Klimt's modernism. Each summer after 1899 Gustav Klimt would join the exodus out of Vienna into the countryside, where he painted some of his most accomplished and atmospheric early landscapes (figs. 1 & 2). This tranquil holiday was particularly needed in 1901 after the storm whipped up by his painting Medicine when it was displayed at the Xth Secession Exhibition that spring. He spent the month of August with the Flöge family in Litzlberg, on the Attersee. Klimt was close friends with the Flöges, Helene having been married to the painter's late brother Ernst and Emilie being his closest confidante and a great supporter of his work. Klimt used these rural retreats to recover from the travails of complex and demanding commissions, and to rebuild his strength, rowing and rambling amidst the woods and by the lakeshore, absorbing the Attersee into his art. Whilst on holiday in 1901 Klimt embarked on Seeufer mit Birken. This remarkable landscape is rooted in the natural world yet simultaneously reaches towards the symbolic, decorative avant-garde. It is this synthesis of natural beauty and harmonious regularity which lends the work its ethereal quality.