Forest Slope in Unterach on the Attersee

Forest Slope in Unterach on the Attersee (1916) is one of Klimt's Attersee lake-district landscapes from his final summers there with Emilie Flöge. Unterach am Attersee, a small village at the southern end of the lake, provided Klimt with the steeply rising wooded hillsides that recur across his landscape production. By 1916 his landscape method was fully developed: the square canvas, the elimination of sky and horizon, the all-over treatment that transforms the hillside into a vertical tapestry of colour and mark. The absence of sky in many Attersee landscapes — including this one — removes the conventional anchor of depth, forcing the viewer to read the densely painted surface as pure texture and pattern. This connects Klimt's landscape practice to his ornamental figure work more deeply than is sometimes acknowledged: both employ the logic of the decorative field, where every square centimetre carries equal visual weight. The work also reflects his engagement with Divisionist and Post-Impressionist techniques absorbed from French painting, particularly the way Seurat and Signac had demonstrated that a painting surface covered in discrete marks could generate light optically rather than representationally.

Oil on canvas in square format, with the entire pictorial field — foreground undergrowth, mid-slope trunks, upper canopy — treated as a continuous weave of short strokes in varied greens, ochres, and browns. Klimt avoids compositional hierarchy: no area is more detailed or finished than any other, demanding active visual scanning.