Old Man on his Deathbed (Belvedere): a study of a dying old man, a rare and sombre genre subject; one of Klimt's few direct confrontations with death outside the allegories.

Oil on canvas, 190 × 85 cm — Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. A full-length of Serena Lederer, wife of the industrialist August Lederer and, with her husband, Klimt's greatest patron; she stands, slender, in a white gown that merges almost into the pale ground, in an early portrait of great delicacy, before the golden style. The near-white tonality — the figure a pale presence against a pale field — is unusual and beautiful, and it shows Klimt's portraiture at a refined transitional moment. The Lederers would become the owners of the greatest private collection of Klimt, most of it destroyed in 1945; this portrait of Serena, in the Met, is a survivor and the beginning of that long patronage. It is one of the finest of the pre-golden portraits.

Serena Lederer and her husband August, the industrialist, were Klimt's most important patrons: over the years they assembled the greatest private collection of his work — the Beethoven Frieze, the University pictures, portraits and landscapes without number — most of which was seized and largely destroyed in the Nazi era. This portrait of Serena, painted in 1899, is one of the earliest fruits of that patronage and one of the finest of Klimt's pre-golden portraits.

The picture's beauty is its near-monochrome delicacy: Serena stands slender and erect in a white gown that dissolves almost entirely into the pale ground, so that the figure is a pale, refined presence, the face and hands the only firm notes — a whistlerian harmony in white that is unlike anything in the later, denser portraits. It shows Klimt's portraiture at a moment of exquisite restraint, before the ornament took over, and it is a survivor of a collection largely lost. That it is in the Metropolitan Museum, one of the finest Klimts in America, is an accident of the dispersal that scattered the Lederer holdings; it remains the beginning of the greatest of Klimt's patronal relationships.

The near-white harmony of the Serena Lederer — the pale figure dissolving into the pale ground — is one of the most refined effects in Klimt's portraiture, and it shows his awareness of Whistler, whose 'symphonies' and 'harmonies' in white the Secession's exhibitions had brought to Vienna. It is a portrait of extreme elegance and restraint, and it stands at the head of the Lederer patronage that would sustain Klimt for the rest of his life. The tragedy of that patronage — the greatest private Klimt collection, seized and largely burned after 1938 — gives the early portrait a retrospective poignancy; Serena herself died in 1943, a refugee. The Met's picture is a survivor and a beginning, the first of the many Klimts the Lederers would own.

What to look at

The pale, slender figure dissolving into the pale ground; the white-on-white harmony; the face and hands the only firm notes. Then the Lederer patronage it begins, the greatest and the most tragic of Klimt's collecting relationships.

That one of the loveliest of Klimt's early portraits should be in New York, a survivor of a Viennese collection largely destroyed, is a small emblem of the whole history of his patrons — the beauty preserved, the world that made it lost.

Oil on canvas, Bank Austria Kunstforum / Albertina, Vienna. A tall, dark picture of two nixies or 'silverfish' — female figures with fish-like lower bodies, drifting in dark water, their hair streaming — one of Klimt's images of the woman as water-creature, of the same family as Moving Water and the Water Serpents. The elongated format and the dark, dreamlike treatment, the female nudes dissolved into the aquatic element, belong to the Secession-era symbolism. It is one of the erotic-aquatic pictures in which Klimt explored the female body as a sensual, drifting, half-animal being, a theme drawn from the Jugendstil fascination with the nixie and the siren.

The Silverfish or Nixen belongs to the family of Klimt's water-pictures — the nixies, sirens and 'silverfish' who are women with the drift and the sensuality of aquatic creatures, their bodies elongated in the tall narrow format, their hair streaming in the dark water. The subject is the Jugendstil siren, the woman as a beautiful, half-animal being of the deep, and it belongs to the Secession-era symbolism that Klimt shared with the international current of Böcklin, Toorop and Khnopff.

With Moving Water, the Goldfish, and the two Water Serpents, the picture forms Klimt's aquatic cycle, one of the frankest and most sensual strands of his art — the female body dissolved into water, sexuality rendered as flow and drift. These pictures were among the most erotic Klimt showed, and the least mediated by allegory or portrait; the nixie was a licensed form in which the naked female body could be celebrated. The elongated format and the dark, shimmering water make the Silverfish a characteristic and beautiful example, now divided in its display between the Kunstforum and the Albertina in Vienna.

The elongated, vertical format of the Silverfish is characteristic of Klimt's aquatic and allegorical pictures of these years — the tall narrow panel that suits the drifting, streaming, vertical movement of the water-women — and it derives in part from the Japanese hanging scroll and the Jugendstil love of the attenuated decorative field. The dark, shimmering water, the streaming hair, the elongated bodies make the picture a nocturne of the erotic, the female body celebrated in its most fluid and sensual mode. It belongs with the whole cycle of Klimt's water-pictures, and with the erotic drawings, as evidence that beneath the public art of portraits and allegories ran a continuous, frank celebration of the female body and its pleasure.

What to look at

The elongated nixies drifting in the dark water; the streaming hair; the tall narrow format. Then the aquatic-erotic cycle it belongs to, one of the frankest strands of Klimt's art of the body.

Divided in its modern display between the Kunstforum and the Albertina in Vienna, the Silverfish is one of the finest of the early aquatic pictures and a characteristic example of the tall, dark, sensual water-nocturnes of the Secession years. It remains one of the frankest and most beautiful of Klimt's celebrations of the female body in its aquatic, sensual mode. With the Goldfish and the Water Serpents it forms the aquatic cycle, one of the most sensual strands of the whole œuvre.

Oil on canvas, Belvedere, Vienna. One of Klimt's early Attersee landscapes: a farmhouse half-hidden among birch trees, seen close and flat, the sky excluded, the surface a dense field of foliage and trunks. It belongs to the beginning of the great landscape series Klimt painted in the summers at the lake, and it shows the method already forming — the cropped, close, all-over composition, the dissolution of the scene into a patterned surface, the square-ish format. The landscapes are the least-known and, to many, the most beautiful part of Klimt's work, and this early farmhouse is one of the first statements of the manner that would produce the Birch Wood and the Pear Tree.

The Attersee landscapes, of which this early farmhouse is one, are the product of the summers Klimt spent from 1900 onward at the Salzkammergut lake with Emilie Flöge and her family — the holidays away from Vienna, the commissions and the scandals, in which he painted the water, the woods, the meadows and the farmhouses in a manner quite distinct from the figure paintings. Almost square, close-cropped, sky-excluded, they dissolve the scene into a dense, all-over, patterned surface.

Farmhouse with Birch Trees shows the manner early and forming: the house half-hidden among the pale trunks, the composition flattened, the eye held on the shimmering surface of foliage and wall. The landscapes have no people and no drama; they are Klimt at his most serene, the anxiety and the eroticism of the figure paintings set aside for the quiet, radical work of turning a stretch of countryside into pure decorative pattern. They are, increasingly, the part of the œuvre that painters most admire, and the Belvedere holds several; this early farmhouse is one of the first of a series that would run to the painter's death.

Klimt's landscapes were painted almost entirely in the summers, in the few weeks of holiday at the Attersee, and they number some fifty-odd — a quarter of the painted œuvre — yet they are the part least present in the popular image of Klimt, overshadowed by the gold. In recent decades they have been increasingly recognised as among his finest achievements: radical experiments in flatness and pattern, quiet and unpeopled, the summer countryside turned into shimmering decorative surface. Farmhouse with Birch Trees is an early example of the manner, and the Belvedere, which holds it, sets it among the landscapes that are now seen as the serene counterpart — and the equal — of the anxious, erotic figure paintings.

What to look at

The farmhouse half-hidden among the pale birch trunks; the excluded sky; the close, flat, all-over surface. Then the manner forming — the countryside turned into shimmering pattern — that the landscape series would perfect.

The Belvedere holds it among the landscapes that are now recognised as the serene equal of the golden figure paintings, and it is one of the first statements of a manner Klimt would refine across two decades of Attersee summers. It is one of the first of the fifty-odd landscapes that are now seen as a central, not a marginal, part of the œuvre.

Cows in a Stall (Kühe im Stall) (Lentos Art Museum, Linz): a rare interior/animal subject — cows in a byre — of the first Attersee years, an unusual motif for Klimt, painted with a dark naturalism.

Oil on canvas, 80 × 80 cm — Leopold Museum, Vienna. A near-abstract landscape: almost the whole square is filled with the shimmering, patterned surface of the lake, the water rendered as a dense field of small dabs of blue and green, with only a thin strip of the far shore at the top. It is one of the most radical of Klimt's landscapes — the sky excluded, the middle distance eliminated, the picture reduced almost entirely to the flat, all-over surface of the water — and it anticipates, in its flatness and its rejection of the focal point, the concerns of later abstraction. It is the Attersee dissolved into pure pattern, and one of the loveliest of the lake pictures.

On Lake Attersee is among the most radical of all Klimt's landscapes, and one of the boldest paintings of its date anywhere. Almost the entire square is filled by the surface of the lake — a shimmering, all-over field of small dabs of blue and green, with only a thin strip of the far shore at the very top to anchor it — so that the picture is very nearly an abstraction, a monochrome field of water, made a decade before abstraction had a name. Klimt achieved it by his characteristic method: cropping the view with a viewfinder, excluding the sky, eliminating the middle distance, and bringing the flat surface up against the picture plane.

The result is a picture that seems to anticipate the concerns of a later generation — the all-over field, the rejection of the focal point, the surface as the subject — while remaining, in its shimmering blues and greens, a faithful image of the lake on a summer day. It is the Attersee dissolved into pure pattern, and one of the loveliest and strangest of Klimt's landscapes; the Leopold Museum, which holds it, shows it as one of the treasures of the landscape œuvre, the point at which Klimt's flattening of the visible world goes furthest.

The near-abstraction of On Lake Attersee has made it one of the landscapes most cited in the account of Klimt as a precursor of modernist flatness — the all-over field, the excluded sky, the surface as subject, achieved not by theory but by the patient observation of water and light with a cropping viewfinder. It is a reminder that the same painter who made the hieratic, ornamental golden icons was also a radical observer of nature, and that the flattening of the visible world into pattern runs through both the figure paintings and the landscapes. The Leopold Museum holds it as one of the treasures of the landscape œuvre, the point at which Klimt's love of the flat decorative surface meets the summer lake and produces something very close to abstraction.

What to look at

The lake filling almost the whole square as a field of blue-green dabs; the thin strip of far shore at the top; the near-abstraction. Then the radicalism — the surface as the subject — a decade before abstraction had a name. It is, quite simply, one of the most radical landscapes painted anywhere at its date, and one of the loveliest in the whole series. The Leopold Museum, built on Rudolf Leopold's great collection of Klimt and Schiele, holds it as one of the treasures of the landscape œuvre.

Portrait of Rose von Rosthorn-Friedmann (private collection): a society portrait of the turn of the century, in the manner shading toward the golden style.

The picture

A frieze in marble, enamel, gold, coral, semi-precious stone and ceramic, executed by the Wiener Werkstätte from Klimt's cartoons for the dining-room of the Palais Stoclet in Brussels; its principal panels are the Tree of Life with the standing figure of Expectation (a dancer) and the embracing couple of Fulfilment. Klimt's one surviving monumental decoration in place. — Stoclet Palace, Brussels.

The subject

The Stoclet Frieze is the summit of the Wiener Werkstätte's ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk — the total artwork in which architecture, furniture and decoration are conceived as one — for which Josef Hoffmann designed the whole house and every fitting within it. Klimt's dining-room frieze is not painting but a permanent mosaic of precious materials: a great swirling golden Tree of Life filling the long walls, with the Egyptian-robed dancer Expectation on one side and the golden embracing couple of Fulfilment — the direct sibling of The Kiss — on the other. Here the golden style's origins in the mosaic and the precious object are literal: the 'painting' is made of gold and stone.

Context and reception

The frieze is the purest realisation of the golden style's roots in Byzantine mosaic and the Werkstätte's cult of the precious material — the easel picture become architecture, image and gold and stone made one. Its embracing couple, Fulfilment, is the sibling of The Kiss, and its dancer, Expectation, one of Klimt's great decorative figures. It survives in place in the Stoclet Palace (a UNESCO World Heritage Site, rarely open), Klimt's one monumental decoration not destroyed, and the fullest surviving statement of the total-artwork ideal.

What to look at

The swirling golden Tree of Life; the Egyptian-robed dancer Expectation; the golden embracing couple of Fulfilment; the marble, enamel, gold and semi-precious stone. Then the Gesamtkunstwerk — architecture, furniture and mosaic conceived as one.

The Wiener Werkstätte and the total artwork

The Stoclet Frieze was made for the Wiener Werkstätte's supreme achievement, the Palais Stoclet, in which Josef Hoffmann designed the building and every object within it as a single total artwork — the Gesamtkunstwerk that was the Secession's and the Werkstätte's ideal. Klimt's frieze, executed by the Werkstätte's craftsmen from his cartoons in marble, enamel, gold, coral and semi-precious stone, is the fullest realisation of that ideal and of the golden style's origins in the mosaic and the precious object: here the painting is literally made of gold and stone, a permanent mosaic, the easel picture become architecture. It is Klimt's one surviving monumental decoration in place, the rest — the University pictures, the Beethoven-era canvases — having been destroyed.

Seeing it

The Stoclet Palace is a private house (now a UNESCO World Heritage Site) and is not open to the public, so the frieze in place is almost never seen; it is known chiefly through the MAK's cartoons and through photographs. That Klimt's one surviving monumental decoration should be effectively inaccessible is one of the ironies of his afterlife — the summit of the total-artwork ideal, sealed in a Brussels mansion.

Coda

The Stoclet Frieze is Klimt's one surviving monumental decoration and the summit of the Wiener Werkstätte's total-artwork ideal — the Tree of Life with its dancer and its golden lovers, executed in marble, enamel and gold for a Brussels palace. Its embracing couple is the sibling of The Kiss, and the whole is the golden style made literal: painting become permanent mosaic of precious stone.

The Large Poplar I (Neue Galerie): an early Attersee landscape of a great poplar tree, in the manner shading from the atmospheric toward the flat, all-over surface; a forerunner of the Approaching Thunderstorm (Large Poplar II).

The work

Casein paint, gold leaf, graphite and applied materials (mother-of-pearl, coloured glass, gilt tacks, a mirror fragment) on plaster, in three parts totalling some 34 metres — Belvedere, Vienna (shown in the Secession building, for which it was made). A monumental frieze running around three walls of a side room, painted for the fourteenth Secession exhibition of 1902, which was conceived as a temple to Beethoven around Max Klinger's polychrome statue of the composer. It is Klimt's first great decorative cycle in the symbolist manner and the direct forerunner of The Kiss.

The programme

The frieze illustrates, in the terms of Wagner's interpretation of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the redemption of humanity through art and love. On the first long wall, the Yearning for Happiness: a file of floating female genii drifting above, and below them a naked, kneeling couple and an armoured knight who set out, at the plea of suffering humanity, on the quest for happiness. On the short wall, the Hostile Forces: the giant Typhoeus, a winged ape-monster, and his daughters the three Gorgons; beside them the figures of Sickness, Madness and Death, and of Lust, Wantonness (a gross reclining nude) and Gnawing Grief — the forces the quest must pass. On the third wall, the resolution: the yearning genii again, then Poetry with her lyre, and finally This Kiss to the Whole World — the choir of angels and, at the climax, a naked couple embracing within a great mandorla of gold, the Ode to Joy made visible.

The Gesamtkunstwerk

The Beethoven exhibition was the Secession's supreme attempt at the total artwork: Josef Hoffmann designed the space; twenty-one artists contributed; Klinger's statue was the centre; and at the opening Gustav Mahler conducted a brass arrangement of the Ninth's finale. Klimt's frieze was the painted heart of it, and it was meant to be temporary — painted directly on the walls in cheap casein, to be destroyed when the show closed. It was, in the event, cut from the walls and preserved; it passed through private hands (the Lederer collection), was seized and recovered, and was acquired by the Austrian state and restored, and it is now shown in a reconstruction of its original setting in the Secession building.

The embrace and The Kiss

The final embracing couple — the naked lovers in the golden mandorla, the culmination of the quest, the 'kiss to the whole world' — is the direct ancestor of The Kiss of 1907–08 and of the Fulfilment of the Stoclet Frieze: the same fused pair, the same dissolution into gold, the same union as the redemption of the human. The Beethoven Frieze is where Klimt first stated, at monumental scale, the theme the golden pictures would perfect: longing, the hostile drives, and redemption through love and art.

Reception

The frieze, like everything Klimt showed in these years, was attacked — the Hostile Forces, with their gross nudes and their monsters, were called pornographic and repellent, the whole conception incomprehensible. It is now recognised as one of the summits of Viennese Jugendstil and of Klimt's symbolist art, the fullest surviving statement of his allegorical programme and the bridge from the University pictures (destroyed) to the golden phase.

What to look at

The floating genii; the kneeling suppliant couple and the golden knight; Typhoeus and the Gorgons; the gross figures of the vices; Poetry with her lyre; and the final embrace in the golden mandorla. Then the materials — the mother-of-pearl, the glass, the gilt tacks, the mirror — that make the surface a jewelled relief. Then remember Mahler conducting the Ninth at its opening.

Coda

The Beethoven Frieze is Klimt's first monumental fusion of allegory, ornament and the erotic — the redemption of humanity through art and love, told in floating genii, hostile monsters and a final golden embrace. It is the forerunner of The Kiss, the summit of the Secession's dream of the total artwork, and one of the great decorative cycles of European modernism, saved by chance from the destruction it was designed for.

The materials and the surface

The frieze is not painting alone but a mixed, applied surface — casein on plaster, with gold leaf, and set into it fragments of coloured glass, mother-of-pearl, gilt upholstery tacks, semi-precious stones, and even, in the reflection of the Gorgons, a piece of mirror — so that the whole thirty-four metres are a jewelled relief, catching the light, part painting and part mosaic. This is the Wiener Werkstätte aesthetic of the precious material applied to the wall, and it is the technical origin of the golden pictures: the gold and the applied ornament that would fill Adele and The Kiss are first tried here, at monumental scale, on the plaster of the Secession. The graphite drawing of the floating genii — long, linear, economical — shows the draughtsman beneath the decorator, and the contrast of the drawn line and the jewelled encrustation is part of the work's richness.

Survival and restoration

The frieze's survival is a small miracle. Painted to be destroyed, it was instead detached from the walls in sections after the exhibition and sold; it passed to the collector Carl Reininghaus and then to the Lederers, Klimt's great patrons, in whose collection it was seized by the Nazis after 1938; recovered after the war but held under an export ban, it was finally bought by the Austrian state in 1973 and, after a long restoration, installed in a purpose-built room in the basement of the Secession building, where it can be seen in something like its original relation to the space. That it exists at all, given the destruction of so much of Klimt's monumental work (the University pictures, the Immendorf fire), makes it the single most important survival of his decorative art.

The place in Klimt's development

The Beethoven Frieze is the hinge between the University scandal and the golden phase. The University pictures (1900–07) had made Klimt the great controversialist of Viennese art, the painter of cosmic pessimism rejected by the professors; the golden phase (from 1901) would make him the master of the jewelled surface. The frieze stands between: still an allegory of the human condition in the University manner — longing, hostile forces, redemption — but already deploying the gold, the applied ornament and the flattened figure of the golden style. It is where Klimt learned, at monumental scale and in a temporary work he could risk everything on, to fuse the symbolist programme with the decorative surface; everything in the golden decade grows from the experiment made on these three plaster walls.

Beethoven Frieze, plate 1 (left wall): Yearning for Happiness (Belvedere): a section of the Beethoven Frieze — the floating genii and the suppliant couple of the first wall (see the main entry on the Beethoven Frieze).

Beethoven Frieze, plate 2 (left wall): Yearning for Happiness (Belvedere): another section of the first wall of the frieze — the floating genii of longing (see the Beethoven Frieze entry).

Beethoven Frieze, plate 3 (left wall) (Belvedere): a further section of the frieze's first wall (see the Beethoven Frieze entry).

Beethoven Frieze, plate 4 (left wall) (Belvedere): a section of the frieze — the knight and the suppliants setting out on the quest for happiness (see the Beethoven Frieze entry).

Beethoven Frieze, plate 5 (centre wall): The Hostile Forces (Belvedere): the central wall of the frieze — Typhoeus and the Gorgons and the vices (see the Beethoven Frieze entry).

Beethoven Frieze, plate 6 (centre wall): The Hostile Forces (Belvedere): another section of the frieze's central wall (see the Beethoven Frieze entry).

Beethoven Frieze, plate 7 (right wall): Yearning for Happiness Finds Repose in Poetry (Belvedere): the section of the frieze with Poetry and her lyre, leading to the final embrace (see the Beethoven Frieze entry).

Beethoven Frieze, plate 8 (right wall): This Kiss to the Whole World (Belvedere): the resolution of the frieze — the choir of angels and the embracing couple in the golden mandorla (see the Beethoven Frieze entry).

Oil on canvas — Kunsthaus Zug (Kamm collection). A landscape of a fir wood: the tall, dark trunks rising in parallel, the ground below dense with undergrowth and light, the whole a close, flat, all-over field with no sky and no horizon. One of Klimt's woodland interiors, of the same family as the Birch Wood, in which the forest is rendered as a vertical screen of trunks against a dense patterned ground, the eye given no way out — the flattening of the landscape into pure surface. The fir and birch woods are among the most admired of the Attersee pictures, and Fir Wood I is a fine example of the manner: the forest as a decorative field, at once naturalistic in its detail and radically flat in its design.

The woodland interiors — the fir and birch woods — are among the most admired of Klimt's landscapes, and Fir Wood I is a fine example of the type. The tall dark trunks rise in parallel across the canvas, a vertical screen; the ground below is a dense field of undergrowth, snow or fallen needles, rendered in small dabs; the sky is excluded, and the eye, given no horizon and no opening, is held on the flat patterned surface of the forest. It is the landscape as pure decorative field, the trees a rhythm of verticals against the shimmering ground.

Klimt painted the woods near the Attersee in several such pictures, each a variation on the screen of trunks and the carpet of the forest floor, and they are the quietest and, to many, the most beautiful of his works — landscape reduced to pattern and rhythm, without figure, drama or gold. Fir Wood I, now in the Kamm collection at the Kunsthaus Zug, is one of the group; its dark, close, enveloping forest is the woodland equivalent of the shimmering lake pictures, the same radical flattening applied to the trees.

The woods Klimt painted near the Attersee — the firs and the birches — gave him the vertical motif that the horizontal lake pictures lacked: the rhythm of the trunks against the field of the forest floor. In Fir Wood I the dark, close, enveloping forest fills the canvas with no sky and no opening, and the eye is held on the surface, the depth denied — the flattening of the landscape into pure pattern and rhythm. These woodland interiors are among the most atmospheric of the landscapes, and the most nearly abstract after the lake pictures; they show Klimt's decorative sensibility applied to nature with the same rigour as to the golden portraits, the forest become a field of vertical and shimmer.

What to look at

The tall dark trunks rising in parallel; the dense, light-filled ground; the excluded sky and denied depth. Then the forest as pure pattern and rhythm, the woodland equivalent of the shimmering lake pictures.

The Kamm collection at the Kunsthaus Zug preserves it as one of the finest of the woodland interiors, the forest turned into a field of vertical rhythm and shimmering ground, and a quiet masterpiece of the landscape manner.

The picture

Oil and gold on canvas, 84 × 42 cm, in a beaten-copper frame made by the painter's brother Georg Klimt, inscribed JUDITH UND HOLOFERNES — Belvedere, Vienna. A tall, narrow panel: a woman seen from the hips up, her head thrown slightly back, her eyes half-closed, her lips parted, one breast bared, a gold choker at her throat; her right hand grips, at the lower edge and almost cropped from the frame, the hair of the severed head of Holofernes. Behind her, a field of stylised gold — the trees and hills of an Assyrian relief, flattened into ornament. It is the first great statement of Klimt's golden style and the defining image of his femme fatale.

Judith, not Salome

The subject is the Book of Judith: the pious widow of Bethulia who saved her people by going to the tent of the Assyrian general Holofernes, letting him become drunk, and cutting off his head. In the whole prior tradition Judith is a heroine — virtuous, patriotic, chaste, the instrument of God. Klimt made her something the tradition had never made her: a Viennese society woman in the flush of erotic triumph, her face slack with a pleasure that is inseparable from the killing, the murder and the orgasm fused. So unsettling was this to Klimt's contemporaries that they preferred to call the picture Salome — the other biblical beheader, the licensed femme fatale of Wilde and Beardsley and Strauss — and the misnaming persisted for decades, against the inscription on the frame. Klimt's Judith is the age's great fantasy and fear of the woman as devourer: beautiful, sexual, deadly, and enjoying it.

The gold and the frame

Judith I is the golden style's first full flowering. The gold ground, drawn from the Byzantine and Assyrian art Klimt studied, flattens the picture into a decorative plane; only the face, the bared breast and the hands are modelled flesh, floating in the shimmer. The gold choker at the throat — the fashionable jewel of the Viennese woman — is also, pointedly, a band across the neck, the mark of the beheading transferred to the beheader. The beaten-copper frame, made by Georg Klimt and integral to the work, carries the title and completes the object: the picture is a precious thing, an icon in metal, the easel painting become craft. It hangs in the Belvedere as the overture to the golden decade.

Adele Bloch-Bauer?

The model has often been identified, on no firm evidence, with Adele Bloch-Bauer, the sitter of the two portraits and (by tradition) Klimt's lover; the choker, similar to one Adele wore, has fed the speculation. Whether or not it is Adele, the face is the type Klimt would return to — the dark-haired, heavy-lidded, sensual Viennese woman — and Judith is the first of the series of powerful, dangerous, desiring women that runs through the whole œuvre to Judith II and beyond.

What to look at

The half-closed eyes and parted lips — the face of erotic triumph; the bared breast; the gold choker as a band across the throat; the severed head cropped at the lower edge, easy to miss; the flattened gold trees behind; the copper frame with its title. Then decide whether she is a heroine or a monster — the picture will not let you settle it.

Coda

Judith I is the golden style's manifesto and the femme fatale's: a biblical heroine remade as a Viennese woman in erotic triumph over a severed head, set in gold like a Byzantine empress. It fixed, in 1901, the two things Klimt's golden decade would be about — the dangerous, desiring woman and the precious, flattening surface — and it remains, in the Belvedere, one of the most disquieting images of the modern erotic.

The femme fatale and Vienna 1900

Judith I has to be seen against the culture that produced it. The femme fatale — the beautiful woman as devourer, the union of sex and death in the female — was the great obsession of the European fin de siècle, from Swinburne and Baudelaire to Moreau's Salomes, Munch's vampires, Wilde's and Strauss's Salome, and the whole Symbolist iconography of the dangerous woman; and nowhere was it more charged than in Vienna, the city where, at the very moment Klimt was painting Judith, Freud was uncovering the drives of sex and aggression beneath the bourgeois surface, and Otto Weininger was about to publish Sex and Character (1903), the age's most notorious document of misogynist anxiety. Klimt's Judith is the visual centre of this: not a monster from myth but a contemporary Viennese woman, in a fashionable choker, with the face of a specific, recognisable sensuality, who has killed and is transfigured by it. The picture gives form to the male fear and desire that ran beneath the gilded drawing-rooms — the woman as the site of both, beautiful and lethal.

The composition and the crop

The narrow vertical format is essential to the picture's disquiet. Judith fills it from the hips up, pushed close to the picture plane, so that the viewer is intimate with her; and the severed head of Holofernes is pushed to the very bottom edge and cropped, so that at first glance one may not see it at all — the picture reads as a portrait of a woman in erotic reverie, and only then does the eye find the head her hand grips. The cropping is a deliberate withholding: the violence is present but marginal, subordinated to the face, so that the horror is discovered inside the beauty rather than announced. It is a thoroughly modern device — the influence of Japanese composition and of photography's arbitrary frame — and it makes the viewer complicit, seduced before the killing is noticed.

The two Judiths

Judith I of 1901 should be seen with its sequel, Judith II (1909, Ca' Pesaro, Venice), which is in this catalogue among the article entries. The second Judith is a different image of the same fusion of sex and violence — more agitated, more clawed, the hands become talons, the body in a more angular and disturbing pose, in the more nervous manner of Klimt's late style; where the first Judith is serene in her triumph, the second is frenzied. Together they frame the golden decade: the calm devourer of 1901 and the frantic one of 1909, the femme fatale at the beginning and the end of the gold.

History

The picture was bought from Klimt by the Galerie Miethke and entered the Moderne Galerie (later the Belvedere) in 1912; it has been one of the central works of the Austrian state collection ever since, and it survived the catastrophes that destroyed so much of Klimt's work. Its copper frame, by the painter's brother Georg (himself a metalworker and chaser), is original and integral, and it is one of several instances of the Klimt brothers' collaboration in making the picture a total, crafted object.

What the picture settled

Judith I settled the direction of Klimt's art for the golden decade. It fused, for the first time completely, the gold ground and the flat ornament with the modelled sensual face; it declared the femme fatale as the central subject; and it made the picture a precious object, framed in worked metal, an icon rather than a window. Everything in the golden phase — the gold Adele, Danaë, The Kiss — descends from the decisions made in this narrow gold panel of 1901.

The technique

The picture is painted in oil with gold leaf laid over parts of the surface — the ground, the choker, the ornamental trees — and worked into; the flesh of the face and breast is modelled in warm oil, the transition from the modelled flesh to the flat gold abrupt and deliberate. The gold is tooled and patterned; the Assyrian-relief trees behind (drawn from the reliefs Klimt could study in reproduction and in the museums) are flattened into a decorative band. The copper frame, beaten and chased by Georg Klimt, is inscribed with the title in stylised capitals and is part of the work's conception as a precious, crafted object. The whole is small — barely a metre high — but its impact is monumental, an effect of the tight vertical crop and the concentration of the sensual face against the gold.

The afterlife of the image

Judith I has become, after The Kiss, one of the most reproduced of Klimt's images, and the model of the Klimtian femme fatale that a century of illustration, poster and pastiche has drawn on. Its fusion of the sacred subject (the biblical heroine) with the profane treatment (the erotic Viennese woman) is the golden style's signature move, and its disquiet — the beauty that is also a horror, the triumph that is also a threat — is the note that separates Klimt's women from mere decorative beauties. It hangs in the Belvedere near The Kiss, and the two together frame the golden decade: the dangerous woman and the tender embrace, the two faces of Klimt's eros.

Reception and the modern reading

For much of the twentieth century Judith I was read, when it was read at all, as a decadent period piece — the very type of the fin-de-siècle femme fatale that modernism had outgrown. The reappraisal of Vienna 1900 restored it as something more: a central document of the age's sexual anxiety, the visual counterpart of Freud's and Weininger's Vienna, the point at which the ornamental beauty of the golden style is put in the service of the age's darkest fantasy of woman. Feminist criticism has read it both ways — as the male gaze's fantasy of the woman as beautiful killer, and as an image, however filtered through male desire, of female power and autonomy. The picture sustains both, as it sustains the double reading of Judith herself, heroine and monster; and that irreducible doubleness is its modern life. It is, with The Kiss and the gold Adele, one of the three Klimts the Belvedere's visitors come for, and the one that most refuses to be comfortable.

A note on the sitter and the model

Klimt worked, as always, from a model, and the question of who posed for Judith I has never been settled; the recurring identification with Adele Bloch-Bauer rests on the resemblance of the choker to one Adele owned and on the general type of the dark, heavy-lidded Viennese beauty, but Klimt used several such models and idealised them all toward a single type. What matters is less the identity than the type: the contemporary, fashionable, sensual woman, given the biblical role, so that the viewer of 1901 would have recognised in Judith not a figure from scripture but a woman of their own city and class — which is exactly what made the picture disturbing. The scandal of Klimt's women was always this collapse of distance: the goddess, the heroine, the saint, given the face and the sensuality of a woman one might meet in a Viennese salon. The frame's inscription, JUDITH UND HOLOFERNES, is the painter's own correction of the misnaming; he knew exactly whom he had painted, and it was not Salome but the heroine the tradition had never dared to make so frankly a creature of desire. That correction, in beaten copper, is Klimt's one plain word about the picture, and it insists on the doubleness: this is the virtuous deliverer of her people, and she is transfigured by the killing into something the age both worshipped and feared.

The copper frame

Georg Klimt (1867–1931), the painter's younger brother, was a metalworker, chaser and repoussé artist who made frames and reliefs for several of Gustav's pictures, and the copper frame of Judith I — beaten, patterned, and inscribed with the title — is his, integral to the work and inseparable from its conception as a precious, crafted object. The collaboration is a small instance of the Klimt family's roots in the metal trades (their father was a gold-engraver) and of the golden style's origin in craft rather than in the easel tradition: the picture is not a painting in a frame but a made object, image and metal together, an icon whose gold begins in the panel and continues into the beaten copper that surrounds it.

Pine Forest II (Tannenwald) (private collection): a woodland landscape of pines, in the close, flat, all-over manner of the forest interiors; a companion to the Fir Wood pictures.

Oil on canvas. An Attersee landscape of the lakeshore with birch trees, in the close, flat, patterned manner of the summer pictures. The birches — their pale trunks against the darker foliage and water — were a favourite motif, and the picture belongs to the great series of lake and wood landscapes Klimt painted in the summers with the Flöge family. Like the others it excludes the sky, crops the view close, and dissolves the scene into an all-over decorative surface; it is one of the many variations Klimt played on the Attersee's shores and trees, each a quiet, radical experiment in the flattening of landscape into pattern.

The birch, with its pale trunk and its delicate foliage, was one of Klimt's favourite landscape motifs — the vertical accents of the trunks against the horizontal field of water or grass — and he returned to it repeatedly in the Attersee summers. Lakeshore with Birches sets the pale trees against the darker water and foliage in the close, flat, all-over manner of the landscape series, the sky excluded, the view cropped, the scene dissolved into a decorative surface.

Like the other lake and wood pictures it is a quiet, radical experiment in the flattening of landscape into pattern, one of the many variations Klimt played on the shores and trees of the Attersee. The landscapes were sold to the same Viennese patrons who bought the portraits, and hung in the same drawing-rooms; they are the serene counterpart to the anxious, erotic figure paintings, and increasingly they are seen as the equal of the more famous golden pictures — Klimt at his most purely painterly, the summer lake turned into shimmering ornament. This lakeshore is one of the series, and a characteristic example of its quiet beauty.

The landscapes were not sold to a different public from the portraits: the same Viennese patrons — the Lederers, the Zuckerkandls, the collectors of the golden pictures — bought the lake and wood scenes and hung them alongside the figure paintings, and Klimt clearly valued them as a central, not a marginal, part of his work. Lakeshore with Birches is one of the many variations he played on the Attersee's shores and trees, each a quiet, radical exercise in flattening the scene into decorative surface. Seen together the landscapes reveal a Klimt quite different from the painter of the femme fatale — patient, serene, absorbed in water and foliage — and increasingly they are held to be the equal of the more famous gold.

What to look at

The pale birches against the darker water and foliage; the close crop; the all-over decorative surface. Then the many variations Klimt played on the Attersee's shores, each a quiet experiment in flattening landscape into pattern.

It is one of the many lakeshore variations Klimt painted in the Attersee summers, each a quiet, radical exercise in the flattening of landscape into pattern, and one of the loveliest of the birch pictures. The birch, with its pale trunk against the darker field, was among the motifs Klimt loved best, and he returned to it again and again in the summers at the lake.

Beech Grove I (Buchenwald) (Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden): a woodland landscape of tall beech trunks rising from a carpet of fallen leaves, one of the most admired of the forest interiors, close in spirit to the Birch Forest — the trees a vertical screen against the shimmering ground.

Oil on canvas, 150 × 46 cm — Kunstmuseum Solothurn. A tall, narrow panel of naked female figures drifting in golden-green water among goldfish, one of them — at the lower edge — turning her bare backside brazenly toward the viewer. The picture was Klimt's mischievous response to the critics who had savaged his University paintings: he is said to have wanted to call it To My Critics, the presented backside a gesture of defiance. It belongs with the Water Serpents and the aquatic pictures as a celebration of the female body in water, and its provocation — the frank nudity, the mocking gesture — is the Secession-era Klimt at his most combative. The gold of the water is an early use of the golden manner.

Goldfish is the Secession-era Klimt at his most combative and most sensual. A tall narrow panel of naked women drifting in golden-green water among goldfish, it is best known for the figure at the lower edge who turns her bare backside brazenly toward the viewer — a gesture Klimt intended, it is said, as a reply to the critics who had savaged his University paintings, so that he wanted to call the picture To My Critics. The presented backside is defiance made flesh; the goldfish and the golden water are the aquatic-erotic theme of the Water Serpents and the Silverfish.

The picture belongs with the water-pictures as a celebration of the female body in its aquatic, sensual mode, and with the combative gestures of the Secession years — the Nuda Veritas, the Pallas Athena — as an assertion of the artist's defiance of a hostile public. The gold of the water is an early use of the golden manner that the following years would make central. It is one of Klimt's most frankly erotic and most mischievous pictures, sensuality and provocation in a single tall panel.

The defiant backside of the Goldfish is the most famous joke in Klimt's work, but the picture is also a serious contribution to the aquatic-erotic cycle — the naked women drifting in golden-green water, their bodies dissolved into the element, sensuality rendered as flow. The gold of the water is one of the early uses of the golden manner, and the tall narrow format is the aquatic pictures' characteristic shape. That Klimt answered his critics not with an argument but with a beautiful, provocative nude turning her back on them is characteristic of the man who left almost no words and let the pictures speak: the reply is the painting, and the painting is at once a gesture of contempt and a celebration of the body the critics found indecent.

What to look at

The naked women drifting among the goldfish in the golden-green water; the figure at the lower edge turning her backside to the viewer; the tall narrow format. Then the joke — the reply to the critics — and the sensuality beneath it.

The picture is both a mischief and a masterpiece — the reply to the critics and one of the loveliest of the aquatic pictures — and it shows the Secession-era Klimt at his most combative and his most sensual at once.

Oil on canvas. A landscape of the lake with a small island, the water filling most of the canvas as a shimmering, patterned field, the island and far shore a thin band above. One of the most nearly abstract of the Attersee pictures — the lake reduced almost entirely to its flat, dabbed surface, the composition daringly empty — and among the loveliest. It belongs with On Lake Attersee to the group in which Klimt pushed the landscape furthest toward pure surface, the water become a field of colour with the barest anchor of shore. These are the pictures in which Klimt is closest to abstraction, and quietest.

Island in the Attersee is among the most nearly abstract of Klimt's landscapes — a companion to On Lake Attersee in its radical reduction of the scene to the flat, shimmering surface of the water. Almost the whole canvas is the lake, a field of small dabs of blue and green, with a small island and the far shore reduced to a thin band; the sky is gone, the composition daringly empty, the picture very nearly a monochrome field of water made a decade before abstraction.

These most reduced of the lake pictures are the ones in which Klimt pushed the landscape furthest toward pure surface, and they are, to many, the loveliest — the Attersee become a field of colour with the barest anchor of shore or island. They show a side of Klimt entirely different from the golden femme fatale and the ornamental portrait: the patient, radical observer of water and light, turning the summer lake into shimmering pattern. Island in the Attersee is one of the finest of the group, and one of the quietest and boldest pictures in the whole œuvre.

The most reduced of the lake pictures — On Lake Attersee, Island in the Attersee — are the boldest paintings Klimt made, and their boldness is the more striking for being achieved without any programme of abstraction: Klimt simply looked at the water, cropped it close, excluded the sky, and let the flat shimmering surface fill the square. The result anticipates, by chance and by sensibility, the concerns of a later art, and it shows how deep Klimt's commitment to the decorative surface ran — deep enough to turn a stretch of open water into a near-monochrome field of pattern. Island in the Attersee is one of the finest of these, and one of the quietest and most radical pictures in the œuvre.

What to look at

The lake filling the canvas; the small island and thin far shore; the daring emptiness of the composition. Then the near-abstraction — the water become a field of colour — that makes it one of the boldest pictures in the œuvre.

With On Lake Attersee it is among the boldest paintings Klimt made, the lake reduced almost to a monochrome field of shimmer, and one of the works by which the modern re-estimate has recognised his landscapes as radical in their own right. It hangs among the most admired of Klimt's landscapes, a near-abstraction achieved by pure looking, and one of the quiet radicalisms of his art.

Oil on canvas, 181 × 84 cm — Wien Museum, Vienna. A full-length of Emilie Flöge (1874–1952), the fashion designer who was Klimt's lifelong companion, in a tall, narrow format: she stands in a long, close-fitting patterned blue-and-gold gown that Klimt himself may have designed, against a shimmering ground of blue and gold ornament, her face turned to the viewer. It is the portrait of the most important woman in Klimt's life — his summer partner at the Attersee, the runner of a celebrated couture house, the woman he called for on his deathbed — and it is an early statement of the ornamental portrait, the figure merging into a decorative field, that the golden phase would perfect. Emilie is said to have disliked the picture; it is nonetheless the great image of the companion of Klimt's life.

Emilie Flöge was the most important woman in Klimt's life — his companion for the last twenty-seven years, his summer partner at the Attersee, the proprietor of a celebrated Viennese couture house, the wearer and maker of the loose 'reform' dresses that freed women from the corset and that Klimt loved and designed — and this full-length of 1902 is his great portrait of her. She stands tall and slender in a long, close-fitting gown of blue and gold pattern (possibly a Flöge design, possibly Klimt's), against a shimmering ornamental ground, her dark hair piled up, her face turned to the viewer.

The picture is an early statement of the ornamental portrait — the figure beginning to merge into a decorative field of pattern — that the golden phase would perfect, and it is the tenderest subject in the œuvre, the woman who was the constant of Klimt's life. Emilie is said to have disliked the portrait and did not keep it; their relationship, probably unconsummated and never marital but wholly central to both, is one of the enigmas of Klimt's private life. The Wien Museum holds the portrait as one of the icons of that life and of the emerging ornamental style.

The relationship between Klimt and Emilie Flöge is one of the enigmas of his life: they were companions for twenty-seven years, summered together, appear together in photographs, and Klimt's dying words were reportedly 'Get Emilie' — yet the relationship was probably never sexual (Klimt's many children were by his models), and they never married. Emilie ran a leading Viennese fashion house, and the loose, patterned reform dresses she and Klimt championed — freeing women from the corset — are worn in this portrait and in the Attersee photographs. The portrait is thus a double document: of the woman at the centre of Klimt's life, and of the reform-dress aesthetic that was part of the Secession's ideal of art extended into life.

What to look at

The tall, slender figure in the long blue-and-gold patterned gown; the shimmering ornamental ground; the dark piled hair; the face turned to the viewer. Then the woman herself — the companion of Klimt's life — and the reform dress she wears. It is, whatever Emilie thought of it, the great image of the companion of Klimt's life and one of the finest of the pre-golden portraits.

Portrait of Gertrud Loew (Gertha Felsövanyi) (private collection): a full-length of a young woman in a pale gown against a shimmering ground, in the delicate transitional manner of the early golden years; a lovely society portrait with a restitution history typical of Klimt's pictures.

The Hostile Powers (Beethoven Frieze, detail) (Belvedere): the central section of the Beethoven Frieze — the giant Typhoeus and the three Gorgons, with the figures of the vices — catalogued here as a detail of the frieze (see the main entry on the Beethoven Frieze).

Approaching Thunderstorm (The Large Poplar II) (Leopold Museum): a great poplar tree under a darkening, thundery sky, one of the very few Klimt landscapes with a dramatic mood of weather — the tree a dark mass against the massing clouds, the flattening tempered by a real sense of the storm. One of the finest and most atmospheric of the landscapes.

Beech Grove II (private collection): a second beech-wood landscape, of the same family as Beech Grove I — the tall trunks and the carpet of leaves in the close, flat, all-over manner.

Oil on canvas. A landscape of a birch wood: the pale trunks rising in a screen across the canvas, the ground below a dense carpet of fallen brown leaves rendered in small dabs, the whole a close, flat, all-over field with no sky. One of the most admired of Klimt's woodland pictures, in which the forest becomes a vertical screen of trunks against a shimmering patterned ground, the eye held on the surface with no way through. The birch wood was a favourite motif — the vertical accents of the trunks against the horizontal field of leaves — and Klimt painted it several times; this is among the finest, a quiet masterpiece of the landscape manner.

Birch Forest (or Birkenwald) is one of the most admired of Klimt's woodland landscapes. The slender pale trunks of the birches rise in a screen across the canvas; the ground below is a dense, glowing carpet of fallen brown and gold leaves, rendered in innumerable small dabs; the sky is excluded, and the eye is held on the flat, shimmering surface of the forest, given no way through the screen of trunks. It is the landscape as pure decorative field — the vertical rhythm of the trunks against the horizontal shimmer of the leaf-carpet — and one of the quiet masterpieces of the Attersee summers.

The birch wood was a favourite motif, painted several times, and the pictures are among the most purely beautiful in the œuvre — Klimt with the eroticism and the anxiety of the figure paintings set aside, at work on the patient, radical translation of a stretch of forest into pattern and light. The carpet of fallen leaves, glowing gold-brown, gives the Birch Forest a warmth and a richness that the cooler lake pictures lack; it is autumn made into ornament, and one of the finest of the woodland landscapes.

The Birch Forest is often singled out as the finest of Klimt's woodland landscapes, and its beauty is in the warmth of the leaf-carpet — the glowing gold-brown of the fallen autumn leaves, rendered in innumerable small dabs, against the cool pale verticals of the trunks. It is autumn turned into ornament, the forest floor become a shimmering field, the trunks a rhythm across it. The picture shows Klimt's landscape manner at its fullest: the close crop, the excluded sky, the all-over patterned surface, the denial of depth, the dissolution of the scene into decorative pattern — and, within that rigorous flatness, an intense feeling for the particular light and colour of the season. It is one of the works by which the modern re-estimate has raised the landscapes to the level of the golden figure paintings.

What to look at

The pale birch trunks rising in a screen; the glowing gold-brown carpet of fallen leaves below; the excluded sky and denied depth. Then autumn turned into ornament, and the intense feeling for the season within the rigorous flatness.

The Birch Forest is among the works by which the landscapes have been raised, in the modern estimate, to the level of the golden figure paintings — Klimt at his most purely painterly, autumn turned into shimmering ornament.

The Large Poplar / Approaching Storm (private collection): a version or study related to the Approaching Thunderstorm (Large Poplar II) — the great poplar under a darkening sky, one of the few of Klimt's landscapes with a strong mood of weather.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 181 × 67 cm — National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. A tall, narrow panel: a naked, red-haired pregnant woman stands in profile, her great belly the centre of the picture, her hand at her side, her face turned to the viewer; behind and around her, in the dark, hover a grotesque death's-head, a monstrous face, and the masks of sickness and grief, while at the top a band of ornament presses down. It is the most direct and the most shocking of Klimt's allegories of life and death — the naked pregnant body, which academic art did not show, made the subject of a major picture.

The pregnant nude

Pregnancy was not a subject for the fine art of the nineteenth century; the pregnant body was hidden, unmentionable, and certainly not the centre of an exhibition picture. Klimt made it exactly that: a full-length naked pregnant woman, seen in profile so that the belly dominates, painted with a frank and tender realism, and surrounded by the figures of death and disease that attend generation. The picture fuses Klimt's great themes — sex, birth, death — in a single image: the belly is the beginning of life, and around it crowd the ends of it, the death's-head and the masks. Hope is the pregnancy; the hostile forces are the mortality that frames every birth.

The scandal and the concealment

Hope I was so shocking that it could not be publicly shown at first; Klimt's patron Fritz Waerndorfer, who bought it, kept it behind a special cabinet with doors, to be shown only to chosen guests — the picture of the pregnant nude too transgressive even for the collector's wall. It belongs with Danaë and Judith as the frankest of Klimt's treatments of the female body, and it is the boldest in its subject: not desire or death alone but generation, the pregnant body as the crossing-point of life and death.

Hope I and Hope II

Klimt returned to the subject in Hope II (1907–08, in this catalogue), a very different treatment — the pregnant woman clothed, bowed, in the golden manner, with a death's-head on her belly and mourning figures below. The two Hopes frame the golden phase's meditation on birth and death: the first frank and naked and surrounded by monsters, the second veiled in gold and grave. Together they are Klimt's fullest statement on pregnancy as the human condition's central mystery.

What to look at

The great belly, the picture's centre; the red hair; the tender, frank realism of the body; the death's-head and the masks of sickness and grief in the dark behind; the band of ornament pressing from above. Then the boldness of the subject — the naked pregnant woman, made the centre of a major picture for the first time in Western art.

Coda

Hope I is Klimt's boldest allegory — the naked pregnant body, surrounded by the figures of death, made the subject of a major painting. Too transgressive for public show in its day, it is now recognised as one of the great images of the human condition: hope as the pregnancy, mortality as its frame, life and death crossing in the woman's body.

The model and the realism

The pregnant woman was painted from a model who was in fact pregnant — Klimt's realism was not invented — and the frank, particular rendering of the belly, the breasts and the body is part of the picture's force: this is not an idealised allegory of Fecundity but a specific pregnant body, observed. The tenderness and the exactness of the observation are what make the surrounding monsters — the death's-head, the masks of sickness and grief — so charged: the real, vulnerable, particular body of a pregnant woman, and around it the abstract, hovering forces of the mortality that attends every birth. The picture fuses the two registers Klimt kept in tension throughout his art, the observed body and the symbolic ornament, and here the tension is at its sharpest.

The place in the œuvre

Hope I belongs with Judith, Danaë and the erotic drawings as the group of pictures in which Klimt confronted the female body most directly, and it is the boldest of them in subject — not desire, not death, but generation, the pregnant body that art had never centred. It anticipates Hope II and, more broadly, the whole meditation on the cycle of life — the Three Ages, Death and Life — that runs through the mature work. The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa acquired it, and it is one of the most important Klimts in North America, the frank pole of his art of the body, as Hope II is its veiled and golden one.

The title

The title Hope (in German Die Hoffnung) is Klimt's own, and its irony is the picture's key: hope is the pregnancy, the new life in the belly, and it is ringed by the death's-head and the masks of sickness and grief, the forces that threaten every birth and every life. The woman looks out at the viewer, calm, over her great belly, unafraid of the monsters behind her — hope confronting mortality and holding its ground. It is one of Klimt's most concentrated fusions of his two great themes, birth and death, in a single figure, and the title names the fragile, defiant thing the pregnant body carries.

Coda

Hope I is the frank and naked pole of Klimt's meditation on the female body and the human cycle — the pregnant woman, observed with tenderness and exactness, surrounded by the hovering forces of death. Too bold for public view in its day, kept behind cabinet doors by the collector who bought it, it is now among the most admired and most reproduced of the pre-golden pictures, and one of the great images of pregnancy in Western art: hope and mortality in one body, the beginning of life ringed by its ends. The Ottawa picture, one of the most important Klimts in North America, is thus both a scandal of its day and, now, a canonical image of the modern confrontation with birth and mortality.

Will-o'-the-Wisps (Irrlichter) (private collection): a symbolist picture of drifting female spirits — will-o'-the-wisps — in the manner of the aquatic and allegorical female figures; one of the dreamlike figure pictures of the golden years.

Pale Face (Bildnis / Der blasse Gesicht) (Neue Galerie): a portrait head of a woman with a pale, masklike face against a dark ground, of the golden years — a strange, haunting image, less a society portrait than a study in mood.

The picture

A near-square landscape almost entirely filled by a single pear tree in full leaf and fruit, seen close, the foliage a dense, shimmering, all-over field of small dabs of green and gold, the sky excluded, the tree brought flat against the picture plane. One of the most admired of Klimt's landscapes and one of the fullest realisations of his method. — Harvard Art Museums (Busch-Reisinger Museum).

The subject

The picture is the landscape as pure decorative surface: the tree is not set in a space but pressed against the plane, its foliage dissolved into a mosaic of dabbed colour that fills the whole square, with only a strip of dappled ground below. Klimt achieved the effect by his characteristic means — the close crop, the excluded sky, the elimination of depth — and the result is a shimmering field, at once a faithful image of a fruit tree in summer and a near-abstract pattern of green and gold. It is the vegetal equivalent of the golden ground, the pointillé dab building a surface as dense and as flat as the gold of the portraits.

Context and reception

The pointillist touch — small dabs of colour building the mass of the foliage — shows Klimt's awareness of the Neo-Impressionists whose work the Secession exhibited, adapted to his own decorative ends. The Harvard picture is among the works by which the landscapes have been recognised as central to Klimt's achievement, the serene, unpeopled counterpart to the anxious figure paintings and, in their flatness and all-over surface, among the most radical pictures of their date.

What to look at

The single pear tree filling the square; the dense, shimmering field of dabbed green and gold; the excluded sky; the strip of dappled ground. Then the near-abstraction — the tree become a flat field of pattern — and the pointillist touch that builds it.

The landscapes and the modern estimate

For most of the twentieth century Klimt's landscapes were overshadowed by the gold, treated as a private, minor pursuit; the modern re-estimate has reversed this, and pictures like the Pear Tree are now held to be among his finest and most forward-looking works. Their radical flatness, their all-over composition, their dissolution of the motif into a field of dabbed colour anticipate concerns that later abstraction would make central, and they show a Klimt quite different from the painter of the femme fatale — patient, serene, absorbed in foliage and light. The Pear Tree is one of the pictures most often cited in this reappraisal, and one of the loveliest examples of the manner, the fruit tree turned into a shimmering tapestry of green and gold that fills the eye.

Coda

Pear Tree is one of the summits of Klimt's landscape art — a single fruit tree turned into a shimmering, all-over field of green and gold, the landscape dissolved into pure decorative surface. In the Busch-Reisinger at Harvard, it is among the works that have raised the landscapes, in the modern estimate, to the level of the golden figure paintings. It is one of the pictures by which the modern viewer discovers that the painter of the gold was also a radical of the flat, all-over surface.

The picture

A knight in golden armour on a golden horse, seen frontal, set in a field of decorative ornament with a band of flowering meadow — an allegory subtitled Life is a Struggle (Das Leben ein Kampf). It is one of the first pictures of the golden phase to use gold as its dominant material, and one of the few in which Klimt made a male figure the centre. — Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya.

The subject

The knight — armoured, mounted, frontal, immobile in his field of gold — is a symbolist emblem of the human struggle, the individual armed against the forces of life, and it has been read as a self-image, the artist as embattled knight, in the years of the University battle. The gold armour and the golden horse against the ornamental ground make it a key transitional work between the symbolist allegories of the 1890s and the full golden style; the band of flowering meadow at the base is the millefleurs that would reappear under the feet of the lovers in The Kiss.

Context and reception

The male figure is rare in Klimt, whose subject is almost always the woman; The Golden Knight is one of the few exceptions, and its subject — struggle, endurance, the armed self — is correspondingly unusual, closer to the heroic than to the erotic. It belongs with Pallas Athena (the armed goddess) as one of Klimt's images of the armoured champion, and it points forward, in its gold and its ornament, to the golden decade about to open.

What to look at

The knight in gold armour on the golden horse; the frontal, immobile pose; the field of decorative ornament; the band of flowering meadow at the base. Then the subtitle — Life is a Struggle — and the possible self-image of the embattled artist.

The place in the golden decade

Painted at the very start of the golden phase, The Golden Knight stands between the militant symbolist allegories of the Secession years — Pallas Athena, Nuda Veritas — and the erotic golden icons to come. Its subject, the armed champion, and its gold armour tie it to the Athena; its ornamental field and its flowering meadow tie it to The Kiss. That the champion here is male and immobile, an emblem of endurance rather than of desire, sets it apart from the golden pictures that followed, almost all of which are of women; and its subtitle, Life is a Struggle, gives it a note of grim resolve that the later golden works, for all their edge of the abyss, replace with tenderness or sensuality. Now in the Aichi museum in Japan, it is one of the golden pictures that left Europe, and a key work for the transition into the style.

Coda

The Golden Knight is one of the first full statements of Klimt's golden manner and one of his few pictures centred on a male figure — a symbolist emblem of the human struggle, the armed self immobile in a field of gold, painted in the years of the University battle. Now in a Japanese collection, it is a key transitional work between the Secession symbolism and the golden phase.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 170 × 96 cm. A full-length of Hermine Gallia, wife of a Viennese industrialist, in a shimmering white gown of soft, dissolving fabric, standing against a pale, indeterminate ground. A portrait of the transitional years, between the naturalism of the early portraits and the gold of the mature ones. — National Gallery, London.

The subject

The picture's beauty is the white gown — a great confection of soft, pale, shifting fabric that Klimt (or the Wiener Werkstätte, or Emilie Flöge) may have designed, painted in dissolving, shimmering tones so that the figure seems to float in a pale field. The face is modelled with care; the decorative flattening is present in the treatment of the dress but has not yet swallowed the figure as it would in the golden portraits. It belongs to the sequence of society-women portraits — the Lederers, the Riedlers, the Bloch-Bauers — that is one of Klimt's central achievements, and it is among the loveliest of the pre-golden group.

Context and reception

The National Gallery in London acquired the portrait, one of the few Klimts in a British public collection, and it is valued as an example of the transitional manner and of the Viennese society portrait of the Secession years. The soft, shimmering white and the floating figure show Klimt's debt to Whistler and his own developing sense of the dress as a field of decorative interest in its own right — the fabric becoming, as it would in the golden portraits, almost the equal of the face.

What to look at

The shimmering white gown of soft, dissolving fabric; the pale, floating figure; the carefully modelled face; the indeterminate ground. Then the transition — the decorative flattening beginning in the dress, not yet swallowing the figure.

The dress and the society portrait

The great shimmering white gown of the Hermine Gallia is one of the most beautiful passages of fabric in Klimt's portraiture, and it points to the increasing importance of dress in his images of women — the gown becoming a field of decorative interest that rivals and, in the golden portraits, nearly swallows the face. The reform dress and the Wiener Werkstätte fashions, championed by Emilie Flöge, were part of the Secession's ideal of art extended into life, and Klimt's portraits are among their finest records. The Hermine Gallia belongs to the sequence of society-women portraits that runs from the Serena Lederer through the Fritza Riedler to the golden Adele, and it is one of the loveliest of the transitional group, the dress a shimmering field, the face still the focus.

Coda

The Portrait of Hermine Gallia is one of the loveliest of Klimt's transitional portraits — a Viennese industrialist's wife in a great shimmering white gown, floating in a pale field — and one of the few Klimts in a British public collection, in the National Gallery in London. It stands between the naturalistic early portraits and the golden ones, the dress already a field of decorative beauty. It remains one of the loveliest of the transitional portraits, the dress a shimmering field, the face still its focus.