First Look: Gustav Klimt’s “Insel im Attersee”

New York | 16 May

One of Gustav Klimt’s most evocative landscapes, Insel im Attersee, will appear at auction for the very first time at Sotheby’s Modern Evening Auction on 16 May. Painted between 1901 and 1902, during Klimt’s bucolic summers at Attersee, the work epitomizes a new and radical approach to landscape, a genre which allowed Klimt greater artistic freedom than ever before. His early Attersee paintings epitomize Klimt’s new form of expression and approach to composition, with Insel im Attersee perhaps the most radical and striking example from the group. The painting is characterized by the distinctive “cropping” of the scene, evident in the ways in which the horizon sits unusually high in the image with the upper edge of the island cut out of the frame.

Gustav Klimt’s Insel im Attersee will be offered as a part of the New York Sales in Sotheby’s Modern Evening Auction on 16 May.

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