Gustav Klimt

Heinrich Böhler, Vienna and St. Moritz

Mabel Forbes Böhler, St. Moritz and Lugano (acquired by descent from the above in 1940)  

Karleen Forbes Nash (acquired by descent from the above, her sister, and until 1971) 

Acquired in December 1972 by the present owner

Tokyo, Isetan Museum of Art, Gustav Klimt, 1981, no. 15, n.p., illustrated in color (titled Waldabhang in Unterach am Attersee and dated 1917)

New York, Galerie St. Etienne, Gustav Klimt Drawings and Selected Paintings, 1983, no. 6 (dated 1917)

Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Gustav Klimt, 1987, no. 35, p. 75, illustrated in color; p. 170 (titled Woudhelling in Unterach aan de Attersee and dated 1917)

Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, Gustav Klimt: Modernism in the Making, 2001, no. 33, p. 134, illustrated in color; pp. 135 and 224 (dated 1917)

Vienna, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere and Williamstown, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Gustav Klimt Landscapes, 2002-03, pp. 41-42, 67, 166 and 217; pl. 58, illustrated in color (titled Waldabhang in Unterach am Attersee (Unterach am Attersee))

New York, Neue Galerie, Birth of the Modern Style and Identity in Vienna 1900, 2011, no. 95, p. 256, illustrated in color; p. 281 (titled Unterach am Attersee)

New York, Neue Galerie, Gustav Klimt: 150th Anniversary Celebration, 2012

Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, 2017-2025 (long term loan)

Fritz Novotny and Johannes Dobai, Gustav Klimt, with a Catalogue Raisonné of His Paintings, Boston, 1968, no. 218, p. 373; p. 374, illustrated (dated 1917)

Johannes Dobai, L'Opera completa di Klimt, Milan, 1978, no. 204, p. 110, illustrated (titled Pendio Montano a Unterach sull’Attersee and dated 1917)

Johannes Dobai, “Die Landschaft in der Sicht von Gustav Klimt,” Klimt-Studien, vols. 22-23, nos. 66-67, Vienna, 1978-79, p. 268

Johannes Dobai, Gustav Klimt Landscapes, London, 1988, fig. 52, p. 30, illustrated; p. 140; pl. 53, p. 141, illustrated in color (titled Mountain Slope at Unerach on the Attersee and dated 1917)

Exh. Cat., Kunsthaus Zürich, Gustav Klimt, 1992, p. 370 (titled Waldabhang in Unterach am Attersee and dated 1917)

Gerbert Frodl, Klimt, London, 1992, no. 23, p. 155, illustrated (titled Forest on a slope at Unterach am Attersee and dated 1917)

Alfred Weidinger, Neues zu den Landschaftsbildern Gustav Klimts, Dissertation, Universität Salzburg, 1992, no. 168, p. 142; n.p., illustrated (titled Unterach am Attersee)

Wolfgang Georg Fischer, Monika Oberhammer, and Susanna Partsch, et al., Gegenwelten: Gustav Klimt—Künstlerleben im Fin de Siècle, Munich, 1996, p. 80; p. 86, illustrated in color (titled Waldabhang in Unterach am Attersee and dated 1917)

Stephan Koja, “Von hier und „anderswo",” Belvedere: Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, vol. 9, no. 2, 2003, fig. 25, p. 75; p. 76, illustrated in color

Exh. Cat., Paris, Grand Palais, Vienna 1900 Klimt, Schiele, Moser, Kokoschka, 2005-06, p. 183 (titled Waldabhang in Unterach am Attersee)

Rainer Metzger, Gustav Klimt Drawings & Watercolors, New York, 2005, no. 300, p. 390, illustrated in color (dated 1917)

Alfred Weidinger, ed., Gustav Klimt, New York, 2007, no. 234, p. 303, illustrated in color (titled Unterach am Attersee and dated 1916)

Tobias G. Natter, ed., Gustav Klimt, The Complete Paintings, Cologne, 2012, no. 223, pp. 281, 285, 511 and 632; pp. 358-59 and 631, illustrated in color (titled Unterach on Lake Attersee)

Sandra Tretter and Peter Weinhäupl, eds., Gustav Klimt, Summer Sojourns on the Attersee 1900-1916, Vienna, 2015, no. 46, pp. 100 and 104, illustrated in color; pp.101 and 105 (titled Unterach on Lake Attersee)

Tobias G. Natter, ed., Gustav Klimt: The Complete Paintings, Vienna, 2017, no. 223, pp. 277 and 575; pp. 350-51 and 576, illustrated in color (titled Unterach am Attersee)

One of Gustav Klimt’s most complex and stylized landscapes, Waldabhang bei Unterach am Attersee (Forest Slope in Unterach on the Attersee) is unique among this body of work because it depicts not only the hillside but also views from both sides of the Austrian lake (see fig. 1). Between 1914 and 1916, the artist spent his last three summers living near his regular companions, the Flöge family, in a remote forester’s lodge in Weissenbach on the Attersee’s southern shores. It was there, opposite the small town of Unterach, that Klimt painted Waldabhang bei Unterach am Attersee during his final summer stay in 1916. One of only three known views of Unterach from this period, the present work is also believed to be the last surviving landscape ever painted by Klimt. He executed a subsequent, smaller landscape depicting the village of Bad Gastein in 1917 after returning to his Vienna studio; however, like the fate of many works owned by the Lederer family, it is likely that Gastein was confiscated by the Nazis and destroyed in the 1945 fire at Immendorf Castle where their works had been stored.

One of the defining characteristics of Klimt’s landscapes during his final years was the depiction of the Attersee as a kind of undisturbed idyll—a retreat from the ravages of the modern world in which the artist sought to illustrate a harmonious union between architecture and landscape. It is this aspect of the town of Unterach, set beneath the rising hillside and nestled into the shoreline of the lake, that Klimt so powerfully depicted in his final painting of the town. In his aim to achieve this synthesis, Klimt chose to ignore or remove any unwanted signs of modernity or technology—elements such as roads, traffic or figures, for example—from his depictions: “Comparisons between the architecture depicted [in Klimt’s paintings] and in historical photographs of the site also reveal the extent to which Klimt altered his motifs to make them more cohesive and to formally adapt them to his ideas” (“Last Stays on the Attersee,” Gustav Klimt Database, online, accessed 9 August 2025).

Klimt first began his annual summer sojourns to the Attersee region in 1900, and increasingly came to see this Sommerfrische (or summer vacation) period as a refuge from the stress and strains of the city, as well as a chance to freely pursue his pictorial ideals unconstrained by commissioned work. After the outbreak of the First World War in August of 1914, Klimt’s interest in this sanctuary intensified, and the landscapes subsequently painted at Weissenbach between 1914 and 1916 strongly reflect the artist’s interpretation of the Attersee as an idealized realm far removed from reality. As Frank Whitford writes, these works “evoke a perfect Arcadian world, a fairyland, a place of escape, a refuge from decay and mortality. In this respect Klimt’s decorative effects serve a symbolic function. In their certainties of form and structure, color and texture, they convey a sense of nature idealized and perfected.… they are among the most beautiful and visually stimulating of Klimt’s works and are among the most memorable landscapes produced by any painter in the twentieth century” (Frank Whitford, Gustav Klimt, London, 1993, p. 129) (see figs. 2 and 3). But these landscapes are not merely interested in nature as an idealized site of refuge. Indeed, Klimt’s artistic vision goes further, “they are also some of the most radical pictures Klimt executed. If, in his allegories and portraits, Klimt can be said to hover between the promptings of a nineteenth-century sensibility and a modern desire for change, in his landscapes he seems exclusively to look forward, towards a kind of art that transforms nature and makes it a vehicle for the expression of a personal vision” (ibid., p. 129).

Klimt’s use of landscape to represent a personal vision and what he described as a Stimmung (a mood or atmosphere) has its roots in the late nineteenth-century tradition of German and Austrian landscape painting, as well as in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. The philosopher’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, argues that nature is pure chaos, positing that art, with its balancing harmony between the forces of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, is needed to give meaning to life. The world’s “existence,” he insisted, is “only justified as an aesthetic phenomenon” (Friedrich Nietzsche in his preface to the 1888 edition of Die Geburt der Tragödie).

Klimt eagerly read Nietzsche’s work as early as 1888, when he painted his Burgtheater paintings, and likely agreed with the sentiments expressed by his friend Hermann Bahr in “The End of Naturalism” that “aesthetics are being turned around” in modern landscape painting: “the artist’s nature no longer wants to be a tool of reality, to consummate its exact image; but precisely the opposite, reality now becomes the artist’s subject matter to proclaim his own nature, in clear and effective symbols” (Hermann Bahr, “Die Überwindung des Naturalismus,” Kritik der Moderne, Dresden and Leipzig, 1891, p. 153).

This is not to say, however, that Klimt’s aim with paintings like Waldabhang bei Unterach am Attersee was to create a complete fiction; it is, instead, a carefully planned and thought-out manipulation of nature. The artist’s landscapes are, as Frank Whitford has shown, “faithful to what he saw, yet at the same time they go beyond it. They use design and texture, pattern and color, in order to make the transitory permanent, to arrest the fleeting, to transform and fix a world that is constantly changing and decaying into an immutable paradise” (Frank Whitford, Klimt, London, 1990, p. 184).

As Johannes Dobai asserts, “Klimt, unlike the Impressionists, was not fascinated by a form of art which represented, ultimately, the perfection of naturalism, and hence the artistic apogee of an empirically positivist view of the world. Instead Klimt’s inner passion was for making his understanding more real—focusing on what constituted the essence of things behind their mere physical appearance… The development of his treatment of the picture surface reveals that Klimt must have been well acquainted with the techniques of Impressionism and Pointillism, although he did not set pure colors next to one another. He graded his colors in a way which bears comparison to Monet and Seurat, although his—Klimt’s—work is more refined… the artist wished to create a ‘mood’ painting” (Johannes Dobai, Gustav Klimt, Landscapes, London, 1988, pp. 12-15)

The oft-used square format of these paintings, typically on a scale of 110 by 110 centimeters, reinforces the notion that such paintings reveal internalized concepts of nature rather than mere representations. Klimt had adopted the square format for his works in the late 1890s, beginning with his monumental portrait of Sonja Knips and proceeding to his landscapes with Ein Morgen am Teiche from 1899 (see fig. 4). This coincided with Claude Monet’s use of square canvases, first in his Peupliers and Matinées sur la Seine (see fig. 5) in the 1890s and subsequently (and most regularly) in his extensive series of Nymphéas. Both Monet and Klimt were inspired by the examples set forth in Japanese art, which negated traditional Western notions of perspective and horizons and encouraged interpretation of the picture as a continuous, often decorative, plane. Aided by the square format, elements like houses or trees could be employed to create harmonious rhythmic patterns that resonated with Klimt’s interest in the essence of nature as a projection of the self.

Klimt, in fact, became so reliant upon this square format that he began to make use of a square viewfinder, which he used on the Attersee, to seek out suitable motifs for painting. As he described in a letter written on one of his sojourns to Marie “Mizzi” Zimmermann, this “viewfinder” was a simple square-shaped “hole cut into a piece of cardboard, [with which] I looked for motifs for landscapes I wanted to paint and found many or—if you prefer—few” (Gustav Klimt, Letter to Marie Zimmermann, August, 1903 quoted in Stephan Koja, ed., Gustav Klimt, Landscapes, 2006, p. 29). In addition to the viewfinder, Klimt also began to depend upon the use of other technical aids in the form of opera glasses and a telescope, once writing back to Vienna from the lakeside after having forgotten to pack his opera glasses that it was essential for his painting that they be brought to him. As Stephan Koja has pointed out, there was “a simple, practical reason for the use of a telescope or opera glasses. Klimt wanted to achieve what the French had demonstrated to him: not the simple reproduction of a landscape but its representation through an artistic equivalent—and the conception of a painting as a colored surface. Binoculars and telescopes logically helped him to achieve this. Distant objects could be drawn closer and, at the same time, compressed and flattened. The non-illusionary effect of his paintings increased. This also explains his use of a viewfinder— the landscape as a painting is what was being sought” (ibid., p. 41) (see fig. 6).

As in many of his later landscapes, and clearly manifest with Waldabhang bei Unterach am Attersee, Klimt increasingly flattened his subject matter into simplistic pictorial designs, often dividing the picture into a stacked sequence of horizontal bands of varying motifs (see fig. 7). This painterly device endows each segment of the composition with its own conceptual conceit, while simultaneously coalescing them to create a harmonious impression of a landscape. It is a dramatic technique later adopted in the second half of the twentieth century by both Mark Rothko in his 1950s and 60s abstractions, and by Peter Doig in his own 1990s landscapes (see fig. 8). Marking a development from the influence of Japanese woodblock prints on his work, Klimt is known to have taken note of the example of his protégé Egon Schiele’s equally flattened-out depictions of the old riverside town of Krumau (see fig. 9). Works from this period such as Waldabhang bei Unterach am Attersee mark a transformation from mere landscape into a melancholic kind of portraiture.

Like Schiele, Klimt’s 1916 composition makes use of distinct outlines around many of the forms, particularly the trees. This detail, highlighting the stylized nature of the artist’s compositional design, serves to emphasize yet again that the scene depicted is as much a construction of the mind as it is of the eye. Especially notable in this regard is Klimt’s depiction of the foremost trees; situated almost as if in silhouette against the green and yellow ground, the objects appear more like ancient monoliths than vegetation. Such pictorial effects speak not to pure observation or mimicry, but instead evoke a pastoral reverie outside of time.

In his last landscapes, Klimt is also known to have used photography to aid these “constructions of nature,” reportedly basing his 1914–15 painting Litzlberg am Attersee on an old bromide photographic postcard of the town (see fig. 10). However, Anselm Wagner’s research into Klimt’s 1916 depictions of Unterach has shown that for these landscapes, Klimt also made extensive use of the telescope, both for planning and preparing to achieve the ultimately cohesive and harmonious effects he wanted.

Historically, it was believed that Klimt must have observed the town of Unterach from a boat on the Attersee in order to encompass such a vast topography in his compositions. However, as Wagner’s careful study of the shifts in perspective within Kirche in Unterach am Attersee and Häuser in Unterach am Attersee has revealed, the artist constructed his design for each work by drawing upon several different perspectives of the town and fusing them together into one persuasive, if imagined, union. Writing about these works, Wagner has noted that “the telescope effect serves here to convey a (paradoxical) feeling of transcendence that does not abandon immanence but evokes the sense of an earthly paradise. Even the most banal of objects from these rural surroundings [now] acquires in Klimt’s vision the aura of an enchanted, detached world. This dreamy transfiguration of reality is reminiscent of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘Apollonian dream state,’ described in The Birth of Tragedy, in which ‘the world of the day veils itself and a new world, clearer, more intelligible, more gripping than the other and yet more shadowy... is born before our eyes.’ The distance brought closer by the telescope is ‘clearer, more intelligible’ while at the same time ‘more shadowy’ in its detached incorporeality. Klimt’s use of a telescope is just as dialectical as its result. On the one hand, Klimt’s technically transformed vision and his modernist ‘yearning for distance’ seem very progressive. Indeed, in this respect he was akin to no other artist of his day, and this is a crucial factor determining the epochal significance of his landscapes” (quoted in ibid., p. 170).

In Waldabhang bei Unterach am Attersee, Klimt distills a lifetime of artistic exploration into a single vision—one that is at once grounded in the physical reality of the Attersee and elevated into the realm of the ideal. Through the deliberate manipulation of perspective, the elimination of modern intrusion, and the flattening of forms into rhythmic patterns of color and line, Klimt constructs not a mere record of place, but an enduring statement of his personal philosophy: that nature, transformed by the artist’s hand, becomes a mirror for the inner world.

The first owner of the present work was Heinrich Böhler, heir to the Böhler Werke steel producing factories. Heinrich, his brother Erwin, and his cousin Hans were close friends and patrons of both Klimt and Egon Schiele. They vacationed with Klimt on the Attersee, as is beautifully evoked in Heinrich Böhler’s photographs of Klimt and Emilie Flöge posing together in the garden of Villa Oleander. Upon Heinrich’s death, the present work passed to his widow Mabel and later to her heirs. Leonard Lauder acquired Waldabhang bei Unterach am Attersee in the early 1970s. It was the first painting by Gustav Klimt to enter his collection, where it has remained until today.