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Klimt’s Los
Angeles Collection Five Paintings from the Collection
of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer |
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The five paintings in the Bloch-Bauer
collection show an admirable clarity of development along one line only, that
of reconciling the picture plane to the canvas. Beech Woods (Birch Woods)
in 1903 puts him in the position of Rembrandt measuring for effect (as in the
Hammer Juno), all the brushstrokes are meant to
resolve at a distance. The Byzantine pictures, of which Adele Bloch-Bauer
I (1907) is an example, industriously build up the picture surface in conscious
ornamentation. Apple Tree I (1911 or 1912) gives the result, a naturalism
rendering blooms in sunlight, now with an intelligible surface out of
Pissarro, say. John Singer Sargent’s influence on the portraiture of Adele
Bloch-Bauer II (1912) seems undoubted, and the background reckons Matisse
and Van Gogh’s japonoiserie into the equation. Houses in Unterach
on Lake Atter (1916) has the pellucidity of Beech Woods, but has now
resolved the problem, The remarkable thing, apart from the one line, is the solidity
and accuracy of representation, the care of mastery and precision of craft in
all five paintings, so that no one of them can be singled out.
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