Bäume vor dem Haus 1904

Adolf Hölzel made this painting of trees in front of a house with oil on canvas, sometime in his lifetime. The surface is so worked, so built up, that the whole painting feels like a physical process, a kind of slow accrual. It's like he's trying to capture not just the look of the trees and the house, but the feeling of them, the weight and density of the leaves, the sturdiness of the building. Look at the way he's dabbed the paint on, little strokes and blobs of green and brown. It's almost like he's building up the image bit by bit, slowly, methodically, until it becomes this dense, textured surface. It has a kind of all-over quality, like you could zoom in on any part of it and find something interesting. It reminds me a little of some of the landscapes by Gustav Klimt, that same interest in pattern and texture, that same sense of the painting being a kind of world unto itself. For Hölzel, as for Klimt, art isn't about capturing a scene perfectly. It’s about creating a new one, a world that's both familiar and strange.