Old friend

At MoMA today I ran into an old friend - Gustav Klimt's "Der Park." Long before I saw the painting itself, I had a poster of it on my wall. Its extravagant use of most of the square canvas for a sea of green foliage put me in mind of the chestnut trees I had marveled at in Vienna as a boy from Southern California, overwhelmed by their lushness. My cell phone snaps were no good (any more than having seen them on his cellphone prepared my Chinese friend for Monet's water lilies!), but someone has posted a picture of the dazzling cosmos of color in the canopy when the painting recently traveled to Melbourne... a coincidence that he should be in similarly deciduous-deprived Australia?