The picture

Oil on canvas, 80 × 145 cm. A long horizontal picture of naked female figures — water-serpents, nixies — floating and entwined in a golden-green current, their long hair streaming, their bodies dissolved into the flowing, ornamented water. One of the fullest of Klimt's aquatic-erotic pictures, and one of the most sensual. — private collection.

The subject

The Water Serpents (there are two, I and II) are the summit of Klimt's water-pictures — the naked women as aquatic, drifting, entwined creatures, the female body celebrated in its most fluid and sensual mode, the eroticism (the women embrace, entwine) frank and unmediated by allegory or portrait. The bodies are dissolved into the flowing, patterned, gold-flecked water, so that figure and element merge; the long streaming hair and the entwined limbs make a continuous decorative flow across the horizontal field. It belongs with Danaë and the erotic drawings as one of the most direct of Klimt's celebrations of female sexuality, and here the sexuality is between women, drifting together in the current.

Context and reception

Water Serpents II has one of the most dramatic modern histories of any Klimt: looted from a Jewish collection under the Nazis, it passed through the hands of a Klimt scholar who acquired it improperly, and became the subject of a restitution case; it changed hands privately in the twenty-first century for a sum reported among the highest ever paid for a painting. Its history, like that of the Bloch-Bauer portraits, is bound up with the looting of Vienna's Jewish collections and the long reckoning that followed.

What to look at

The naked women entwined and drifting in the golden-green current; the streaming hair; the bodies dissolved into the flowing, patterned water; the frank, unmediated eroticism. Then the merging of figure and element that is the picture's method and its meaning.

The two Water Serpents and the erotic

The two Water Serpents (I, a small vertical picture in gold and watercolour on parchment; II, this larger horizontal canvas) are the fullest of Klimt's aquatic-erotic pictures and among the frankest of his celebrations of the female body, the eroticism here between women, drifting and entwined in the current. They belong with Danaë, the Goldfish, the Silverfish and the thousands of erotic drawings to the stratum of Klimt's art in which the female body and its pleasure are the direct, unmoralised subject — the private, sensual foundation beneath the public art of portraits and allegories. The frankness that once made these pictures difficult to show is now the ground of the modern estimate of Klimt as, before all else, a painter of desire, and Water Serpents II is one of its fullest and most beautiful statements.

Coda

Water Serpents II is one of the summits of Klimt's aquatic-erotic art — naked women entwined and drifting in a golden current, the female body dissolved into the flowing, ornamented water. Frank, sensual and unmediated, it is among the boldest of his celebrations of female sexuality, and its looting and contested modern history make it, too, a monument of the reckoning with Nazi plunder.

The picture

A near-square landscape almost entirely filled by a dense bank of garden flowers — a riotous, all-over field of blossom in reds, whites, blues, pinks and gold against the green, the sky excluded, the flowers pressed flat against the picture plane. One of the most exuberant and best-loved of Klimt's landscapes. — private collection.

The subject

The cottage-garden pictures are the most colourful of the Attersee landscapes: the bank of flowers — poppies, daisies, zinnias, roses — becomes a dense, shimmering, all-over mosaic of colour that fills the whole square, a tapestry of blossom without sky or depth. It is the landscape method applied to the flower-garden, and the result is one of Klimt's most joyous surfaces, a field of pure colour and pattern. The flowers are at once particular — one can name them — and dissolved into an overall shimmer, the same fusion of the observed and the decorative that runs through all the landscapes.

Context and reception

The picture (and its close relatives, the Bauerngarten mit Sonnenblumen and the Blossoming Meadow) is among the most reproduced of Klimt's landscapes, and one that has commanded, at auction, sums among the highest for any of his works — a measure of the modern love for the flower-pieces. It shows the landscape manner at its most exuberant and least austere, the shimmering field turned from the cool greens of the woods and lakes to the hot riot of the summer garden.

What to look at

The dense bank of garden flowers filling the square; the riot of red, white, blue, pink and gold against the green; the excluded sky; the flowers pressed flat. Then the fusion — the particular blossoms dissolved into an overall shimmer of colour.

The flower-garden pictures

Cottage Garden belongs to the group of flower-garden landscapes — with the Farm Garden with Sunflowers and the Blossoming Meadow — that are the hottest and most colourful of the Attersee pictures, the shimmering field turned from the cool greens of the woods and lakes to the riot of the summer garden. They are among the most reproduced and most valuable of all Klimt's works: a version of the Cottage Garden sold at auction for a sum among the highest ever paid for the artist. Their appeal is immediate — the dense, joyous, all-over field of blossom — and their method is the same rigorous flattening as the austere lake pictures, the particular flowers dissolved into an overall shimmer of pure colour. They are Klimt's landscape art at its most exuberant.

Coda

Cottage Garden is one of the most exuberant and best-loved of Klimt's landscapes — a bank of summer flowers turned into a dense, all-over shimmering field of colour, a tapestry of blossom without sky or depth. It is the landscape method at its most joyous, and among the most sought of all his works. It is the landscape method at its most joyous, and one of the most sought and reproduced of all Klimt's works. The version of the Cottage Garden now in a private collection has commanded, at auction, one of the highest prices ever paid for a Klimt, a measure of the modern love for the flower-pieces. Klimt painted the cottage gardens of the Attersee villages in the last decade of his life, and they are among the happiest things he made — the summer garden turned into a tapestry of pure, shimmering colour.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 180 × 90 cm. A full-length of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein, sister of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, in a white gown, standing against a pale, lightly ornamented ground. A society portrait of the golden years, of one of the most remarkable of Klimt's sitters. — Neue Pinakothek / Bavarian State Painting Collections, Munich.

The subject

Margaret ('Gretl') Wittgenstein was a member of one of the wealthiest and most cultivated families in Vienna — patrons of Brahms and Mahler, and the family of the philosopher Ludwig and the one-armed pianist Paul — and her portrait was a family commission of 1905. She stands in a shimmering white gown against a pale ground with restrained ornament, her face modelled with care, the decorative flattening present but not overwhelming; the sitter is said to have disliked the picture. It belongs to the sequence of golden-years society portraits, and it is distinguished by the eminence of its sitter and her family, at the heart of the intellectual and musical life of Vienna 1900.

Context and reception

The Wittgenstein family's patronage of Klimt is one of many links between the painter and the constellation of Viennese genius — Freud, Mahler, Wittgenstein, Schnitzler — whose city he painted; the portrait of the philosopher's sister is a document of that milieu. The Neue Pinakothek in Munich holds it, one of the major Klimt portraits outside Vienna, and it is valued both as a work and as a relic of the Wittgenstein world.

What to look at

The shimmering white gown; the pale, lightly ornamented ground; the carefully modelled face; the restrained decoration. Then the sitter — the philosopher's sister — and the Wittgenstein world of Vienna 1900 she belonged to.

The Wittgensteins and Vienna 1900

The portrait ties Klimt to the Wittgenstein family, one of the richest and most gifted in Vienna — patrons of music (Brahms and Mahler played in their house), the family of the philosopher Ludwig, of the pianist Paul who lost an arm in the war and had concertos written for the left hand, and of Margaret, this sitter, a formidable and cultivated woman whom the young Ludwig adored. To paint the philosopher's sister is to touch the constellation of genius — Freud, Mahler, Schoenberg, Wittgenstein, Schnitzler — whose city Klimt's art has come to represent. The picture is thus both a fine golden-years society portrait and a relic of the intellectual world of Vienna 1900, and the Neue Pinakothek in Munich holds it as one of the major Klimts outside Austria.

Coda

The Portrait of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein is a society portrait of the golden years and a relic of one of Vienna's most extraordinary families — the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's sister, in a shimmering white gown. In the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, it is one of the major Klimt portraits outside Vienna, and a link to the constellation of genius whose city Klimt painted. It is a fine golden-years portrait and a relic of the Wittgenstein world, one of the major Klimts outside Vienna. Margaret Wittgenstein commissioned the picture herself and, according to family tradition, was not wholly satisfied with it — a common reaction among Klimt's sitters, who sometimes found the painter's vision of them stranger than they wished. The Neue Pinakothek in Munich acquired it, and it hangs there as one of the great examples of Klimt's golden-years portraiture, a link between the painter and the intellectual constellation of his city.

The picture

A near-square landscape almost entirely filled by a dense, shimmering field of foliage and blossom — rosebushes and trees dissolved into an all-over mosaic of green flecked with pink and white, the sky excluded, the depth denied. One of the most beautiful of the Attersee landscapes and one of the most radical in its flatness. — (formerly Musée d'Orsay; restituted).

The subject

The picture carries Klimt's landscape method to its limit: there is almost no space, no focal point, no sky — only the flat, shimmering, all-over field of leaves and flowers, a mosaic of green and pink and white that fills the whole square. It is very nearly an abstraction, a field of dabbed colour, and it is among the works by which Klimt anticipates the concerns of a later art; at the same time it is a faithful, tender image of a garden thicket in summer. The rosebushes' blossoms flecking the green foliage give the picture its delicate colour, and the density of the surface its shimmer.

Context and reception

Rosebushes under the Trees was, until 2021, in the Musée d'Orsay — the only Klimt in a French public collection — when it was identified as having been looted from a Jewish family under the Nazi occupation and was restituted, one of France's most prominent recent restitution cases. Its history, like that of Water Serpents II and the Bloch-Bauer portraits, ties the beauty of Klimt's art to the catastrophe that overtook the world of his collectors.

What to look at

The dense, shimmering field of foliage and blossom filling the square; the flecks of pink and white among the green; the excluded sky and denied depth; the near-abstraction. Then the restitution history that the serene surface does not show.

The landscape as near-abstraction

Rosebushes under the Trees is one of the pictures that carry Klimt's landscape method to the edge of abstraction: there is no sky, no horizon, no focal point, only the flat, shimmering, all-over field of foliage and blossom, a mosaic of green flecked with pink and white that fills the whole square. It anticipates, by pure looking rather than by theory, the all-over fields of a later art, and it shows how deep Klimt's commitment to the decorative surface ran. That it was, until its restitution in 2021, the only Klimt in a French national collection gave it a particular prominence, and its return to the heirs of its looted owners made it, like the Bloch-Bauer portraits and Water Serpents II, one of the emblems of the reckoning with Nazi plunder.

Coda

Rosebushes under the Trees is one of the most beautiful and most radical of Klimt's landscapes — a garden thicket dissolved into an all-over shimmering field of green and blossom, very nearly abstract. Long the only Klimt in a French public collection, it was restituted to its looted owners' heirs in 2021, its serene surface now inseparable from that history. Its beauty and its history — the near-abstract shimmer, the looting and return — are now inseparable, as with so many of the pictures of Klimt's collectors.

The Knight (Golden Knight, detail) (MAK – Museum of Applied Arts): related to The Golden Knight (Life is a Struggle) — the armoured champion of the golden years (see the article entry on The Golden Knight).

The picture

Oil on canvas, 180 × 180 cm — Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome. A square canvas: at the right, an old woman, naked, her body sagging and worn, her face buried in her hand in grief or shame; at the centre and left, a young mother, her eyes closed, holding a sleeping infant against her, the two wrapped in a field of coloured ornament, flowers and circles. The ages of woman — infancy, motherhood, age — set against a dark ground with bands of ornament above and below. One of Klimt's central allegories of the human span.

The subject

The three ages of man (or woman) — the passage from youth through maturity to age and death — was an ancient subject, treated by Titian, Giorgione and many others; Klimt made it a specifically female allegory and gave it his characteristic fusion of the beautiful and the harsh. The young mother and child are idealised, wrapped in ornament, serene; the old woman is painted with an unsparing, almost brutal realism — the sagging flesh, the swollen veins, the bowed head — that is the more shocking for its contrast with the decorative beauty of the mother. The picture refuses to prettify age: the ornament and the idealisation are for youth and motherhood; age is naked truth.

Klimt's realism

The Three Ages of Woman is one of the pictures that answer the charge that Klimt was merely a decorator: the old woman's body is painted with a realism of decay that has nothing decorative about it, a frank confrontation with the ageing female body that the age (and much of art since) preferred to hide. The contrast between the ornamented mother and the unadorned crone is the picture's meaning — the beautiful surface for youth, the truth of the flesh for age — and it is Klimt's most direct statement of the mortality that runs beneath the gold.

What to look at

The sleeping infant against the mother; the mother's closed eyes and serene face; the field of flowers and circles that wraps the two; the old woman at the right, naked, bowed, her face in her hand; the unsparing realism of her body against the ornament of theirs. Then the meaning — youth and motherhood idealised, age told the truth.

Coda

The Three Ages of Woman is Klimt's fullest allegory of the female span — infancy, motherhood, age — and one of his most unsparing pictures: the mother and child wrapped in beautiful ornament, the old woman painted in the naked truth of decay. It is the decorative style confronting its own opposite, and the mortality beneath the gold made visible in the ageing body.

The composition and the bands

The picture is built as a vertical stack against a dark ground, with bands of ornament above and below framing the figures — the decorative structure Klimt used in the allegories of these years. The mother and child at the left and centre are wrapped together in a single field of flowers, circles and coloured pattern, a decorative cocoon that idealises and protects them; the old woman at the right stands apart, outside the ornament, her body given no decorative veil, only the truth of its decay. The spatial separation is the meaning: youth and motherhood are held in the beautiful surface, age is expelled from it into naked reality. The contrast of the ornamented and the unadorned, which runs through all Klimt, is here made the very structure of the picture.

Reception and the modern estimate

The Three Ages of Woman was shown internationally — it won recognition at the Rome exhibition of 1911 and was acquired by the Italian state for the Galleria Nazionale in Rome, where it remains, one of the few major Klimts in a public collection outside Austria. It has been read as the age's meditation on time and the body, and as Klimt's most unsparing confrontation with the ageing female form — a confrontation that the feminist reappraisal has found both honest and harsh, the old woman's decay observed without tenderness where the mother's youth is idealised. The picture holds the ambivalence that runs through all Klimt's treatment of women: reverence and unease, the beautiful and the mortal, the ornament and the truth.

Time and the body

The picture's deepest subject is time — the passage of the single female body from the sleeping infant through the serene mother to the bowed and ruined crone — and it is Klimt's most direct confrontation with it. The infant and the mother are held outside time, in the timeless field of ornament; the old woman has fallen out of the ornament into time and decay. That fall is the picture's tragedy, and its honesty: Klimt will not pretend that the beautiful surface holds against age, and the old woman's naked body, painted without a veil of pattern, is the truth the whole decorative style is laid over.

Seeing it

In the Galleria Nazionale in Rome the picture hangs among the international symbolist and modern works, and it holds its wall by the shock of its contrast — the golden serenity of the mother and child, the naked grief of the crone. The viewer's eye goes first to the beauty and then, unwillingly, to the truth beside it, and the picture's power is in that movement, from the ornament to the flesh, from youth to age, that it compels.

Coda

The Three Ages of Woman is Klimt's fullest and most unsparing allegory of the human span — the ornamented beauty of youth and motherhood, the naked truth of age — and one of the few major Klimts in a public collection outside Austria, in the Galleria Nazionale in Rome. It holds, at its sharpest, the ambivalence of all his art of women: the beautiful surface and the mortal truth, the reverence and the unease, the ornament and the decay. Acquired by the Italian state as early as 1911, it has been seen and reproduced for over a century as one of Klimt's central allegories, and its unflinching old woman remains among the most memorable figures he painted — the truth the gold was always laid over.

The picture

A near-square landscape of a cottage garden with sunflowers: a dense bank of flowers — sunflowers rising among a field of smaller blossoms — filling the square in an all-over shimmer of colour, the sky excluded, the flowers pressed flat against the plane. One of the most exuberant of the flower-garden landscapes. — Belvedere, Vienna.

The subject

The sunflowers rising among the dense field of garden blossom give the picture its structure and its subject — the tall flowers as vertical accents in the all-over mosaic of colour, a little like the trunks in the birch woods — and the whole is one of Klimt's most joyous surfaces, a tapestry of summer flowers without sky or depth. The sunflower had a particular resonance in the period (Van Gogh's, the aesthetic movement's), and Klimt's sunflower pictures have sometimes been read as veiled figures — the flower as a standing woman — but they are, first, exuberant fields of pure colour and pattern.

Context and reception

The Belvedere holds it among the great collection of Klimt, and it is one of the most reproduced and best-loved of the landscapes. With the Cottage Garden and the Blossoming Meadow it forms the group of flower-garden pictures that are the hottest and most colourful of the Attersee landscapes, the shimmering field turned from the cool woods and lakes to the riot of the summer garden.

What to look at

The sunflowers rising among the dense field of blossom; the all-over shimmer of colour; the excluded sky; the flowers pressed flat. Then the sunflowers as vertical accents, and the possible veiled figure among them.

The sunflower and the flower-garden group

The sunflower pictures are a distinct sub-group of the flower-garden landscapes, and the tall flowers give them a structure the others lack — vertical accents rising through the all-over field of blossom, a little like the trunks in the birch woods. The sunflower's period resonance — Van Gogh's, the aesthetic movement's, the flower as an emblem of the sun and of art — has led some to read Klimt's sunflowers as veiled standing figures, the flower as a woman; but the pictures are, first, exuberant fields of pure colour. With the Cottage Garden and the Blossoming Meadow, the Farm Garden with Sunflowers is among the most joyous and most reproduced of the Attersee landscapes, and the Belvedere holds it as one of the best-loved of its Klimts.

Coda

Farm Garden with Sunflowers is one of the most exuberant of Klimt's flower-garden landscapes — a bank of summer blossom with sunflowers rising through it, turned into an all-over shimmering field of colour. In the Belvedere, it is among the best-loved of the landscapes, the hot, joyous counterpart to the cool woods and lakes. With the Cottage Garden and the Blossoming Meadow it is among the hottest and most joyous of the Attersee landscapes, and one of the Belvedere's best-loved Klimts. The sunflower rising through the field of blossom gives the picture its one vertical accent, and its warmth of colour makes it among the most immediately appealing of all the landscapes. The Belvedere, holding the greatest concentration of Klimt anywhere, shows it among the landscapes that are now recognised as the serene and joyous equal of the golden figure paintings.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 153 × 133 cm. A portrait of Fritza Riedler, wife of a Viennese professor, seated frontally in a pale gown against a ground of ornament — mosaic-like panels, an arch of coloured 'eye' shapes behind her head like a halo or headdress. One of the first of the great golden-phase portraits, the immediate forerunner of the gold Adele. — Belvedere, Vienna.

The subject

The Fritza Riedler is the picture in which Klimt's golden portrait manner arrives: the sitter seated frontal, her face and hands modelled flesh, her gown and the ground dissolved into fields of ornament — the mosaic panels at the sides, the arc of coloured shapes behind her head. The arc has been read as a reference to Velázquez (whose portraits Klimt admired, and whose headdresses it recalls) and as a pure decorative halo; either way it frames the face like an icon's, and the picture is the direct forerunner of the gold Adele Bloch-Bauer I of the following year, which would carry the same method to its summit. It is among the finest of the golden portraits and one of the treasures of the Belvedere.

Context and reception

With the gold Adele and the Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein, the Fritza Riedler belongs to the small group of golden-phase society portraits in which Klimt applied the mosaic manner to the likeness of a specific woman. It shows the method just before its extreme statement in the gold Adele: the sitter still legibly seated in a space, the ornament framing rather than wholly swallowing her. The Belvedere holds it as one of the central works of its Klimt collection.

What to look at

The frontal seated figure; the modelled face and hands; the mosaic panels of the ground; the arc of coloured 'eye' shapes behind the head, halo or headdress. Then the picture's place — the arrival of the golden portrait, the forerunner of the gold Adele.

The forerunner of the gold Adele

The Fritza Riedler and the gold Adele Bloch-Bauer I of the following year are the two great golden-phase portraits in which the mosaic manner is applied to a specific woman, and the Riedler is the forerunner: the method arrives here — the frontal seated sitter, the modelled face and hands, the gown and ground dissolved into fields of ornament, the arc of coloured shapes framing the head like a halo — but the sitter is still legibly seated in a space, the ornament framing rather than wholly swallowing her, as it would in the Adele. To see the two together is to watch the golden portrait reach its extreme: the Riedler the arrival, the Adele the summit. The Belvedere holds the Riedler as one of the central works of its Klimt collection.

Coda

Fritza Riedler is the picture in which Klimt's golden portrait manner arrives — the seated sitter framed by fields of mosaic ornament, the coloured arc behind her head like an icon's halo — and the direct forerunner of the gold Adele Bloch-Bauer I. One of the finest of the golden portraits, it is among the treasures of the Belvedere.

The picture

A decorative-allegorical work of intertwined female figures and serpentine forms — the 'hydra' of entwined bodies — in the ornamental manner of the mid-decade. A less-known picture of the golden years, related to the water-serpent and the intertwined-women themes. — Belvedere, Vienna.

The subject

The picture belongs to the family of Klimt's intertwined-figure compositions — the Water Serpents, the Friends, the swirling masses of the later allegories — in which female bodies merge and entwine into a single decorative, serpentine flow. The 'hydra' of the title is the tangle of entwined forms, the many-headed mass, and the picture is one of Klimt's explorations of the female body multiplied and merged into ornament. It belongs with the aquatic and the allegorical pictures rather than the portraits, and it is among the less familiar works of the golden decade.

Context and reception

The Belvedere holds it among its great Klimt collection. Like the Water Serpents and the later Maiden and Bride, it treats the female form not singly but as an entwined, merging mass, the bodies dissolving into one another and into the decorative field — one of Klimt's recurring inventions, the woman multiplied into pattern.

What to look at

The intertwined female figures and serpentine forms; the merging of the bodies into a decorative flow; the ornamental manner of the golden years. Then the theme — the woman multiplied and merged into ornament — that recurs through the œuvre.

The intertwined figure

The merging, entwining female figure is one of Klimt's recurring inventions — the Water Serpents, the Friends, the swirling masses of The Maiden and The Bride — and The Hydra belongs to this family, the many-headed tangle of bodies dissolved into a serpentine decorative flow. The theme is the woman multiplied and merged into ornament, the body become pattern, and it runs from the aquatic pictures of the turn of the century to the great late allegories. The Hydra is one of the less familiar of these, a decorative-allegorical work of the golden decade in which the female form is treated not singly, as icon or portrait, but as an entwined, flowing mass; the Belvedere holds it among its great collection of the painter.

Coda

The Hydra is one of Klimt's less-known decorative allegories of the golden decade — a tangle of intertwined female figures and serpentine forms, the body multiplied and merged into ornament. In the Belvedere, it belongs with the Water Serpents and the later swirling allegories, one of Klimt's recurring meditations on the woman dissolved into pattern. It is one of Klimt's recurring meditations on the woman dissolved into pattern, and one of the less familiar works of the golden decade, held in the Belvedere. The many-headed tangle of the title names the entwined mass of bodies, one of the forms Klimt returned to across two decades, from the aquatic pictures to the late allegories of youth. It belongs, in the Belvedere's collection, with the Water Serpents and the swirling late allegories, one of Klimt's sustained explorations of the female form multiplied and merged into decorative flow, the body become ornament and rhythm.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 77 × 83 cm — Leopold Museum, Vienna (the picture has passed through private and public hands; it is among the Leopold's Klimt holdings). A nude woman fills the almost-square canvas, curled on her side in sleep, her knees drawn up to her breast, her red hair spread, her flesh luminous against a dark and gold ground; between her parted thighs pours a cascade of gold — coins, discs and spirals — the god Zeus descending upon her as a shower of gold. It is the most frankly erotic of Klimt's major paintings and one of the great images of female sexuality in Western art.

The myth

Danaë was the mortal princess whom her father shut in a bronze tower to prevent the prophesied birth of a son who would kill him; Zeus came to her as a shower of gold, and she conceived Perseus. The subject had a long history in art — Titian, Correggio, Rembrandt all painted the reclining Danaë receiving the golden rain — and it was always a transparent figure for the sexual act, a licensed nude. Klimt took the licence to its limit: his Danaë is not a reclining odalisque receiving a symbolic shower but a woman curled in the throes of the act itself, the golden stream pouring between her thighs, her face and body in the abandon of pleasure. The myth is the thinnest of veils over the subject, which is a woman's orgasm.

The gold and the body

The picture is the golden style turned wholly to the erotic. The gold is the god, the semen, the divine and the sexual at once; it pours in a torrent of coins and spirals — one large black rectangle among the gold, a Werkstätte motif, is the one hard note — into the curled, voluptuous, luminous body. The flesh is modelled with a sensuous fullness; the ornament (the gold shower, the purple veil at the top, the circular motifs) frames and enters it. The near-square format and the tight cropping bring the body up against the picture plane, filling it, so that the viewer is close, intimate, complicit. It is Klimt at his most direct and his most beautiful.

Reception

Danaë was, predictably, controversial — a picture of a woman in orgasm, however mythologically dressed, was not what the age hung in its drawing-rooms — and it belongs with Judith, the Water Serpents and the erotic drawings as the frankest expressions of the sexuality that the golden style elsewhere sublimated into ornament. It has become, in the modern reappraisal, one of the most admired of the golden pictures precisely for its frankness: the myth as a figure for female pleasure, painted without moralising or apology.

What to look at

The curled, sleeping-waking body filling the frame; the red hair; the cascade of gold coins and spirals between the thighs; the one black rectangle among the gold; the purple veil; the abandon of the face. Then the myth, which is the thinnest of veils, and the subject beneath it.

Coda

Danaë is the golden style at its most erotic — the mortal woman and the golden god fused in the act, the myth a veil over a woman's pleasure — and one of the frankest and most beautiful images of female sexuality in the history of painting. With The Kiss and the gold Adele it is the summit of Klimt's golden decade, and the boldest of the three.

The reclining nude and its tradition

Danaë belongs to, and transforms, one of the oldest subjects in Western art: the reclining female nude. From Giorgione's and Titian's Venuses through Velázquez's Rokeby Venus to Goya's Maja and Manet's Olympia, the reclining nude was the licensed form in which the European tradition painted the female body and, covertly, female sexuality; and the specific subject of Danaë receiving the golden shower — Titian's several versions, Correggio's, Rembrandt's — was the most openly erotic of them, the myth providing the alibi. Klimt knew this tradition and pushed past it: where Titian's Danaë reclines and receives, serene, Klimt's is curled, foetal, self-enclosed, filling the frame, in the visible throes of the act — the alibi of the myth worn to transparency, the subject unmistakably a woman's orgasm. It is the reclining nude taken to its logical and scandalous end.

The curled body and the format

The composition is radical. The near-square canvas is filled almost entirely by the single curled body — knees drawn up to the breast, head bowed into the thighs, the whole a tight spiral of flesh — cropped so close that there is no room, no setting, no narrative, only the body and the gold. The pose is one of complete self-absorption: Danaë is turned in on herself, her pleasure her own, the god present only as the impersonal golden stream. This is the autonomy the erotic drawings grant the women, brought into a major painting: the woman absorbed in her own sensation, not arranged for a viewer. The tight crop and the filled frame make the viewer close and complicit, and the self-enclosure of the body refuses the viewer even as it exposes.

The gold, the coins, and the black rectangle

The golden shower is the picture's centre — a torrent of gold discs, coins and spirals pouring between the parted thighs, the divine and the seminal fused, the most literal of Klimt's uses of gold as the sexual and the sacred at once. Among the round gold forms is one large black rectangle, a hard Werkstätte note in the soft flood, which has been read as everything from a formal counterweight to a symbol of the womb or the void; it is the one severe element in a picture otherwise all curve and shimmer. The purple veil at the upper edge, the coppery flesh, the gold: the colour is warm and enclosed, the palette of the interior and the body.

Reception and the modern estimate

Danaë was too frank for its time to be a public picture; it belongs with the erotic drawings and the Water Serpents as the most direct of Klimt's treatments of sex, made for private sale and shown carefully. The modern estimate has reversed the Victorian embarrassment: Danaë is now among the most admired of the golden pictures, valued precisely for the frankness that once made it impossible — the myth as a figure for female pleasure, the woman's sensation as the subject, painted without moralising, without the punishing frame that the femme fatale pictures carry. Where Judith fuses sex with death and danger, Danaë is sex without punishment, pleasure as its own end, and it is the tenderer and the bolder for it.

History

The picture was in private collections through the twentieth century and has been associated with the Leopold Museum's holdings and the Viennese private market; like much of Klimt's erotic work it passed quietly, out of the public eye, and its full celebrity is recent. It is now one of the most reproduced of the non-gold-ground erotic pictures.

What it shows about Klimt

Danaë is the clearest evidence that the golden style was, at bottom, an erotic art — that the gold and the ornament are the sublimation, the beautiful veiling, of a desire that here breaks almost entirely through the veil. It is the painting closest to the drawings, the place where the private practice of the erotic line comes nearest the surface of the public art; and it is, with The Kiss and the gold Adele, the third of the summits of the golden decade — the erotic pole, as The Kiss is the tender and the Adele the iconic.

The place among the erotic pictures

Danaë stands at the centre of a group of frankly sexual paintings and thousands of erotic drawings that constitute the least public and, arguably, the most fundamental stratum of Klimt's art. With the Water Serpents (the intertwined female nudes), the Leda, the Girlfriends, and the drawings of women alone and in pairs, it forms an œuvre of the erotic that ran parallel to, and underneath, the public art of the portraits and allegories — an art in which the female body and female pleasure are the direct and unmoralised subject. Danaë is the most fully realised of these in the golden manner, the point at which the private erotic and the public golden style meet in a single major picture, and it is the strongest evidence for the modern reading of Klimt as, before all else, a painter of desire.

The technique and the surface

The picture is painted in oil, with gold used in the shower of coins and discs and in passages of the ground and veil; the flesh is modelled with a warm, coppery fullness, the body given weight and roundness against the flat gold. The tight, near-square format and the filling of the frame by the single body are the composition's boldness; there is no landscape, no architecture, no narrative apparatus, only the body, the gold and the veil, brought close. It is the most concentrated of the major golden pictures, and the most physical — the one in which the modelled body, rather than the ornament, dominates.

Coda and comparison

Set beside The Kiss, Danaë completes the golden decade's account of eros: where The Kiss is love, union, tenderness — two figures, clothed, at the edge of the void — Danaë is desire, sensation, the body alone in its pleasure. The two are the poles of Klimt's erotic art, the tender and the carnal, and both are set in the gold that is at once the sacred and the sexual. Danaë is the bolder and the more private; it was not a picture for the drawing-room wall but for the collector who wanted the thing itself, the female body and its pleasure, without the mediation of allegory or portrait. That Klimt could make of the most transgressive subject one of the most beautiful of his paintings — the curled body, the red hair, the golden shower, the coppery light — is the measure of the golden style's power to exalt as it exposes, to make of a woman's orgasm an icon.

The drawings behind it

Behind Danaë lie the erotic drawings — the hundreds of studies of women reclining, curled, asleep, in the act — that were Klimt's constant private practice, and the painting is in effect the fullest translation of that drawn eros into the golden manner. The curled, self-absorbed pose is one Klimt drew again and again; the autonomy of the woman's pleasure, her turning-in on herself, is the drawings' subject brought into oil and gold. To see Danaë beside the drawings (held chiefly in the Albertina) is to see the continuity of the whole erotic œuvre, from the swift private pencil line to the major golden picture, and to understand that the gold is the drawings' desire made monumental and sacred. It is, finally, the picture that most tests the viewer: to look at Danaë is to be made complicit in a woman's private pleasure, brought close by the crop and shut out by her self-enclosure, and that double position — invited and refused — is the picture's deepest effect, and the reason it remains, a century on, genuinely unsettling and genuinely tender at once.

The provenance and the modern life

Danaë passed, like much of Klimt's erotic work, quietly through private hands in the twentieth century, out of the public exhibitions and the museum walls, and its full celebrity has come only with the modern reappraisal of Klimt and the frank re-estimate of the erotic in his art. It is now among the most reproduced of his non-portrait pictures and one of the images most associated with his name after The Kiss and the gold Adele — a measure of how far taste has travelled from the age that could show it only with caution to the age that prints it on the covers of books. The curled golden woman is now, with Judith and Adele and the lovers of The Kiss, one of the faces of Klimt. The picture's title keeps the myth, but the myth is a courtesy; what Klimt painted, and what the modern viewer sees, is simply a woman, gold, and pleasure.

Friends I (Water Serpents-related) (Belvedere): an image of two women together, of the golden years, related to the theme of female intimacy that runs from the Water Serpents to Women Friends and the late allegories; a study in the entwined female form.

The picture

The cartoon (full-scale design) for the Fulfilment panel of the Stoclet Frieze — the embracing couple, fused into a single golden form patterned with spirals and rectangles, the direct sibling of The Kiss. Mixed media (gouache, watercolour, gold, silver, crayon) on paper; the MAK holds the nine surviving cartoons for the frieze. — MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna.

The subject

Fulfilment is the embracing couple of the Stoclet Frieze — a man and a woman fused into one towering golden form, distinguished only by their patterns, set against the swirling Tree of Life — and it is, with The Kiss itself, the fullest statement of Klimt's theme of union: the two lovers dissolved into a single ornamental monolith, the human become gold. The cartoon in the MAK is the full-scale design from which the Werkstätte craftsmen executed the mosaic in marble and enamel, and it is a finished work in its own right, one of the most beautiful things Klimt made on paper.

Context and reception

The relation of Fulfilment to The Kiss is close and much discussed: both show the fused embracing couple, both were made in the golden years, and the frieze's couple may have preceded and prepared the easel picture. The MAK's nine cartoons for the Stoclet Frieze — Expectation, Fulfilment, the Tree of Life — are the fullest record of Klimt's greatest decorative commission, and among the treasures of the museum of applied arts, the institution at the heart of the Werkstätte world.

What to look at

The embracing couple fused into a golden form; the patterns that distinguish them; the swirling Tree of Life behind; the gold and enamel of the cartoon. Then the relation to The Kiss — the frieze's lovers and the easel picture's.

The Kiss and the frieze

The embracing couple of Fulfilment is the sibling of The Kiss, and the relation between the frieze and the easel picture is one of the closest in the œuvre: both show the two lovers fused into a single golden ornamental form, distinguished only by their patterns, the human dissolved into the decorative. The frieze's couple may have preceded and prepared the painting; together they are the fullest statement of Klimt's theme of union, the redemption of the human through love that the Beethoven Frieze had first proclaimed. The MAK's cartoon is a finished work in its own right, one of the most beautiful of Klimt's works on paper, and the design from which the Brussels mosaic was made.

On paper

The Stoclet cartoons are among the most finished and beautiful of Klimt's works on paper — full-scale designs, in gouache, watercolour, gold and silver, from which the Werkstätte craftsmen executed the mosaic — and they survive, nine of them, in the MAK in Vienna, the museum of applied arts at the heart of the Werkstätte world. Fulfilment, the embracing couple, is the most celebrated of them, a finished work in its own right and the sibling of The Kiss.

Coda

Fulfilment is the embracing couple of the Stoclet Frieze — the golden lovers fused into one ornamental form, the sibling of The Kiss — preserved as a full-scale cartoon in the MAK in Vienna. It is one of the fullest statements of Klimt's theme of union, and one of the most beautiful of his works on paper, the design from which the Brussels mosaic was made.

The picture

Oil, gold and platinum on canvas, 110 × 110 cm — Museum of Modern Art, New York. A square panel: a pregnant woman stands, seen nearly in profile, her head bowed, her eyes closed, clothed in a magnificent patterned robe of gold, brown and coloured ornament that falls over her great belly; on the belly itself, a small death's-head; and at the base of the picture, three women, bowed, their faces hidden, in attitudes of prayer or mourning. The golden-phase companion to Hope I — the pregnant body, now veiled in gold and grave.

The subject

Where Hope I (1903) showed the pregnant woman naked and surrounded by monsters, Hope II clothes her in the golden ornament of the mature style and stills the picture into a grave, hieratic image: the woman bowed over her belly, the death's-head on it, the mourning women below. The fusion of birth and death is the same — the death's-head on the pregnant belly is the picture's centre and its meaning, generation and mortality in one body — but the treatment is now the golden style's: flattened, ornamented, iconic, sacred. It is one of the most beautiful and most sombre of the golden pictures, a Madonna of the modern age with death on her womb.

The gold and the meaning

The robe is one of Klimt's richest passages of ornament — gold, platinum, coloured pattern, falling over the body in a field of decoration — and the beauty of it is set against the death's-head and the mourning women, the same contrast of the ornamented surface and the mortal truth that runs through all Klimt. The bowed head, the closed eyes, the folded posture make the figure grave, inward, resigned; this is not the frank confrontation of Hope I but a veiled, sorrowing meditation, the pregnancy accepted with its mortality. MoMA acquired it, and it is one of the major Klimts in America.

What to look at

The bowed head and closed eyes; the great belly under the golden robe; the small death's-head on the belly; the three mourning women below; the richness of the gold and platinum ornament. Then the contrast, once more, of the beautiful surface and the death it covers.

Coda

Hope II is the golden-phase Hope — the pregnant woman veiled in gold, the death's-head on her belly, the mourning women below: birth and death fused in a grave, iconic image. With Hope I it frames Klimt's meditation on pregnancy, the naked and the golden, the frank and the veiled, and it is among the most sombre and most beautiful of the golden pictures.

The Madonna and the modern

Hope II is, in effect, a modern Madonna — the standing, bowed, robed pregnant woman, attended by mourning figures, has the form of a devotional image, the Virgin of the Annunciation or the Mater Dolorosa — but it is a Madonna with a death's-head on her womb, the Christian promise of birth fused with the pagan certainty of death. The bowed head and closed eyes, the grave stillness, the mourning women make it a picture of acceptance rather than of the frank confrontation of Hope I; the pregnant woman contemplates, with resignation, the life and the death she carries. It is one of the most inward and most sombre of the golden pictures, and one of the most beautiful in its ornament — the great patterned robe among Klimt's richest passages.

The place in the œuvre

With Hope I (1903), Hope II frames Klimt's meditation on pregnancy — the naked and the golden, the frank and the veiled, the young body surrounded by monsters and the grave body accepting its fate. Both are part of the larger cycle of life-and-death allegories — the Three Ages, Death and Life — that is the spine of the mature work, and both centre the pregnant body, Klimt's boldest and most original subject. That MoMA holds Hope II makes it one of the most seen of the golden pictures outside Vienna, and a key work for the American understanding of Klimt.

The ornament of the robe

The great patterned robe that falls over the pregnant body is among Klimt's richest inventions in ornament — a field of gold, platinum, brown and coloured pattern, circles and ovals and stylised forms, that both clothes and exalts the figure. It is the golden style's decoration at its most beautiful, and it is set, deliberately, against the small grim death's-head on the belly and the bowed mourning women below: the most beautiful surface Klimt could make, laid over the gravest subject he treated. The contrast is the picture, and it is the contrast of his whole art.

Seeing it

At MoMA the picture is among the museum's earliest and most treasured European modern works, and it rewards the close look the gold and platinum ornament demands — the density of the patterned robe, the small stark death's-head on the belly, the bowed mourning women. It is a quieter picture than The Kiss or the gold Adele, and a graver, and for many the more moving of the golden works.

Coda

Hope II is the veiled and golden pole of Klimt's meditation on pregnancy — the modern Madonna with a death's-head on her womb, grave, inward, resigned, wrapped in one of his richest fields of ornament. With the naked Hope I it frames the boldest of his subjects, the pregnant body as the crossing-point of life and death, and it is among the most sombre and most beautiful of the golden pictures, held now in New York as one of the major Klimts in America. The picture entered the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and it is, with the Adele portraits and Hope I, one of the works by which the golden Klimt is known outside Vienna — the gravest and most inward of his golden women. Klimt made only two paintings on the theme of the pregnant woman, and Hope II, veiled and golden, is the graver of them — a modern devotional image for an age that had lost its religion but not its fear of death.

Orchard (Fruit Trees) (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh): an Attersee landscape of fruit trees in a meadow, dissolved into a dense, shimmering, all-over field of green and blossom; one of the landscapes in an American collection.

The picture

A near-square landscape of a summer meadow scattered with red poppies, the field rising to a band of trees and flowers at the top, the whole a dense, all-over shimmer of green flecked with the red of the poppies and the colours of other blossoms. One of the most colourful and best-loved of the Attersee meadow landscapes. — Belvedere, Vienna.

The subject

The picture is the meadow as a flat, all-over field of colour: the green grass and the scattered poppies fill the lower two-thirds in a shimmering mosaic, and a band of flowering shrubs and trees closes the top, with no sky and little depth. The red poppies flecking the green give the picture its colour and its life, dots of hot red across the cool field — a device close to the flower-garden pictures but applied to the open meadow. It is one of Klimt's most immediately appealing landscapes, the summer field turned into a tapestry of dabbed colour.

Context and reception

The meadow and flower-field landscapes are among the hottest and most colourful of the Attersee pictures, and the Poppy Field is one of the finest. Like the Cottage Garden and the Farm Garden with Sunflowers, it dissolves the particular flowers into an overall shimmer, the observed and the decorative fused; and like all the landscapes it excludes the sky and denies depth, pressing the scene flat against the plane. The Belvedere holds it among the great collection of Klimt, one of the best-loved of the landscapes.

What to look at

The red poppies scattered across the green meadow; the band of flowering trees at the top; the excluded sky; the all-over shimmer of dabbed colour. Then the poppies as dots of hot red across the cool field.

The Attersee landscapes

Klimt's landscapes — some fifty of them, a quarter of the painted œuvre — were made almost entirely in the summers at the Attersee with Emilie Flöge and her family, away from the Vienna of the commissions and the scandals, and they are the least-known and, in the modern estimate, among the most admired part of his work. Almost all are square, close-cropped, sky-excluded; they dissolve the scene into a dense, all-over, patterned surface, the pointillé dab building a field as flat and shimmering as the gold of the portraits. Unpeopled and serene, they are the counterpart to the anxious, erotic figure paintings, and increasingly they are held to be the equal of the more famous gold.

Flatness and the modern eye

The landscapes' radical flatness — the excluded sky, the eliminated middle distance, the all-over field of dabbed colour pressed against the plane — has made them, in the modern estimate, among the most forward-looking of Klimt's works, anticipating by pure looking the concerns of a later, abstract art. Klimt achieved it with a cropping viewfinder or opera-glass, isolating the motif and bringing it flat to the picture surface; the result is at once a faithful image of a particular place and season and a near-abstract pattern of colour. This is the landscape's quiet radicalism, the same dissolution of the object into decorative surface that the portraits apply to the woman.

Coda

Poppy Field is one of the most colourful and best-loved of Klimt's meadow landscapes — a summer field scattered with red poppies, turned into an all-over shimmering tapestry of dabbed colour. In the Belvedere, it is among the finest of the Attersee pictures, the open meadow made into pure decorative pattern.

The picture

Oil, silver and gold on canvas, 138 × 138 cm — Neue Galerie, New York. A woman sits, or floats, in a shimmering field of gold: her face, her shoulders and her clasped hands emerge as modelled flesh, but her dress and the space around her dissolve into a continuous ornament of gold and silver leaf — spirals, triangles, rectangles, and the recurring Egyptian 'eye' motif — so that the boundary between the sitter and the ground is almost erased. She is Adele Bloch-Bauer (1881–1925), the wife of the sugar magnate Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, and this is the most famous portrait of the twentieth century — the 'Woman in Gold'.

Adele and the commission

Adele Bloch-Bauer was the only sitter Klimt painted twice (this portrait of 1907 and the colour portrait of 1912), and she was, by persistent tradition, his lover; she was a cultivated, nervous, intelligent woman, the hostess of a Viennese salon, and the wife of one of Klimt's greatest patrons. The 1907 portrait was the summit of the golden style in portraiture — the sitter made an icon, a Byzantine empress on a gold ground, her individuality concentrated into the anxious, refined face and the nervously clasped hands (which Adele held so, it was said, to hide a deformed finger), everything else dissolved into a jewelled surface. It is the perfect fusion of the person and the ornament: a real, particular, modern woman, and a timeless icon of gold.

The ornament

The field of gold is Klimt's most elaborate. The 'eye' motifs (Egyptian, and also, some have said, stylised versions of the Bloch-Bauer monogram or of the female form), the spirals (Mycenaean), the rectangles (Werkstätte), the triangles rising from the dress: the whole vocabulary of the golden style is deployed at its densest, and the sitter's body is entirely subsumed into it, only the face and hands surfacing. The picture is, more than any other, the demonstration of Klimt's method — the island of modelled flesh in the sea of flat ornament — and of its meaning: the woman exalted into an icon, and imprisoned in the gold.

The looting and the restitution

The portrait's later history made it the emblem of Holocaust art restitution. After the Anschluss of 1938 the Bloch-Bauer collection was seized by the Nazis; Ferdinand fled, Adele having died in 1925; the portrait was taken by the Austrian state gallery (the Belvedere), which displayed it for sixty years as a national treasure, the 'Mona Lisa of Austria'. Adele's niece and heir, Maria Altmann, who had escaped to America, fought a long legal battle for its return, culminating in an Austrian arbitration panel's ruling in her favour in 2006; the picture was restituted and sold to Ronald Lauder's Neue Galerie in New York for $135 million, then a record. The case — told in the film Woman in Gold (2015) — made the portrait the symbol of the reckoning with the looting of Jewish collections, and its removal from Vienna a national wound.

What to look at

The anxious, refined face and the nervously clasped hands — the only modelled flesh; the field of gold and silver; the 'eye' motifs; the spirals and rectangles; the way the body dissolves entirely into ornament. Then the history — the looting, the sixty years in Vienna, the restitution, the record sale — which the serene golden surface does not show but now cannot escape.

Coda

The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I is the summit of the golden portrait and the most famous portrait of its century — a modern Viennese woman made a Byzantine icon of gold, exalted and imprisoned in ornament. Its history has made it more than a masterpiece: the emblem of a looted, murdered world and of the long struggle to make it right, the Woman in Gold restored, at last, to the light.

The face and the hands

For all the gold, the picture's power is in its two passages of flesh. The face — long, pale, dark-eyed, the mouth slightly open, the expression at once haughty and anxious — is one of Klimt's most searching, and it is a real likeness: Adele Bloch-Bauer was known for her nervous intelligence, her salon, her cigarettes, her headaches, and the face gives all of it, the refined and the strained. The hands, clasped high on the breast, are the other note: Adele held her hands so, tradition says, to conceal a finger deformed or injured, and Klimt made the concealment a gesture of nervous self-protection, the one uneasy movement in the golden stillness. Between them — the proud, strained face and the guarded hands — the sitter's whole character surfaces from the ornament, and it is the tension between that living particularity and the timeless gold that makes the picture more than a decorative panel.

The ornament and its meanings

The field of gold is the densest Klimt made, and its motifs have been read and re-read. The recurring 'eye' shapes are Egyptian in origin (the eye of Horus) but have also been seen as stylised female forms, or as the Bloch-Bauer initials, or simply as apotropaic ornament; the spirals are Mycenaean; the rectangles and the checkerboard passages are the geometric vocabulary of Josef Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte; the triangular forms rising from the lower dress have been read as stylised figures. Whatever the specific readings, the effect is a decorative eternity — every tradition of precious ornament, from Egypt to the Werkstätte, assembled into a single shimmering field, in which the modern woman is set like a relic in a reliquary. The gold both honours and entombs her.

The two portraits of Adele

Adele Bloch-Bauer is the only person Klimt painted twice, and the two portraits — the gold of 1907 and the colour of 1912 (also in this catalogue) — frame the turn of his style. The first sets her in gold, the summit of the golden phase; the second sets her against a wall of hot colour and Asian ornament, in the late manner. Together they are a unique document — one sitter, one painter, two styles, five years apart — and the fact that Klimt returned to her, alone among his sitters, has fed the tradition of their affair and, at the least, marks her particular importance to him. Both were looted, both restituted to Maria Altmann in 2006, and both sold; the second went to Oprah Winfrey and then, in 2023, back to the market.

The restitution and its meaning

The seven-year legal battle of Maria Altmann against the Republic of Austria for the return of the five Bloch-Bauer Klimts — fought through the Austrian courts, the United States Supreme Court (which ruled in 2004 that a foreign state could be sued in American courts for looted property), and finally an Austrian arbitration panel that ruled for Altmann in January 2006 — was a landmark in the law and the ethics of Nazi-looted art. Austria had treated the gold Adele as a national icon, the 'Mona Lisa of Austria', and its loss to New York was felt as a wound; but the ruling established that even a nation's most beloved painting could not be kept on a foundation of theft. The case, and the $135 million sale that followed, made the picture the single most famous instance of restitution, and gave the serene Woman in Gold a second life as the emblem of a historical reckoning.

What to look at, and what it means

Look at the face and the hands, the only flesh; then at the density of the gold, and how completely the body is subsumed; then at the 'eye' motifs and the Werkstätte rectangles; then at the whole, from a distance, as a single golden field with a face. And hold the two things the picture now carries: the exaltation of a particular, nervous, brilliant woman into a timeless icon, and the history of theft, exile, litigation and return that the golden surface does not show and can no longer be seen without. It is a portrait, a masterpiece of ornament, and a monument — all three at once.

The golden portrait as a type

The gold Adele is the summit of a small group of golden portraits — with Fritza Riedler (1906) and the Judith pictures — in which Klimt applied the mosaic manner to the likeness of a specific woman. The type was short-lived: within a few years Klimt abandoned the gold ground for the colour fields of the late portraits, and no other sitter received quite the density of gold that Adele did in 1907. This makes the picture not only the most famous but the most extreme of the golden portraits — the furthest Klimt took the dissolution of the sitter into ornament, the point at which the portrait comes closest to becoming pure decoration and is saved from it only by the face and hands. It is the limit case of the golden style, and its balance — the living face, the total ornament — is why it did not tip over into mere pattern.

Klimt and his patrons, the Bloch-Bauers

Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, Adele's husband, was one of Klimt's most important patrons, and the two portraits of Adele, together with the landscapes he owned, made his collection one of the greatest holdings of Klimt in private hands. The Bloch-Bauer story — the wealthy, cultivated, assimilated Jewish family; the salon; the patronage of the most modern of Viennese painters; and then the catastrophe of 1938, the flight, the seizure, the sixty years of the pictures held by the state that had failed to protect their owners — is the story of Klimt's whole patron class in miniature, and the gold Adele is its central relic: the portrait of the collector's wife, looted and, after two generations, restored.

Coda

The gold Adele is the picture in which the golden style, the portrait, and the history of the twentieth century most completely meet. It is Klimt's supreme portrait — the sitter exalted into an icon of gold, her living particularity concentrated in the face and hands, her body dissolved into the most elaborate ornament he ever made. It is the emblem of his golden decade and, through reproduction, one of the most familiar images in the world. And it is, since 2006, the emblem of the reckoning with the looted art of the murdered Jewish collections — the Woman in Gold taken from her family, held for sixty years by the state, and at last restored. No other picture in this catalogue carries so much: a masterpiece, a period, and a history, in a single field of gold.

The picture in New York

Since 2006 the gold Adele has hung in the Neue Galerie, Ronald Lauder's museum of German and Austrian art on Fifth Avenue in New York, the centrepiece of its collection and the object its visitors come for. Its removal from Vienna to New York — the 'Mona Lisa of Austria' lost to America — was mourned in Austria and celebrated as justice by the Bloch-Bauer heirs and their supporters, and the picture now carries, wherever it hangs, the double charge of its beauty and its history. It is, at the price of $135 million paid in 2006, long a record for a painting, the most valuable object in this whole series of catalogues, and the one whose fate has been most bound up with the history of the twentieth century. It remains, whatever its price and its history, first of all a painting — and as a painting it is Klimt's most sustained act of the golden imagination, the one in which a living woman and a field of gold are held in a balance so exact that neither the person nor the ornament wins, and both are made permanent.

The frame of a decade

With Judith I at its start (1901) and the colour Adele near its close (1912), the gold Adele of 1907 stands at the centre of the golden decade and at its height — the fullest, densest, most sustained of all the golden pictures, made in the same year as Danaë and The Kiss, the annus mirabilis of the style. To see the three works of 1907 together — the erotic Danaë, the tender Kiss, the iconic Adele — is to see the golden imagination at its absolute summit, and the gold Adele is the portrait among them, the one in which a living, named, particular woman is raised into the eternity of the ornament. It is the golden style's supreme act of portraiture, and it was never surpassed, because Klimt, having reached this limit, turned away from the gold.

The picture

A near-square picture of a single great sunflower plant, its dark leaves and heavy head rising against a dense field of smaller garden flowers, the whole an all-over shimmer of green flecked with colour. The sunflower stands frontal and central, a dark vertical mass, and the picture has often been read as a veiled figure — the flower as a standing woman. — Belvedere, Vienna.

The subject

The Sunflower is the most anthropomorphic of Klimt's flower-pieces: the single great plant, standing frontal and central, its dark leaves falling like a robe, its head bowed, has been read as a veiled version of the embracing couple of The Kiss or as a standing female figure, the flower become a person. Whether or not the reading is intended, the picture is one of the most striking of the garden landscapes — the dark mass of the sunflower against the shimmering field of blossom, the vertical accent that the flower-gardens otherwise lack. It is a landscape that verges on allegory, the plant charged with the sensual meaning of Klimt's human figures.

Context and reception

The sunflower had a rich period resonance — Van Gogh's, the aesthetic movement's, the flower as emblem of the sun and of art — and Klimt's sunflower pictures draw on it while turning it to his own decorative and possibly figurative ends. With the Farm Garden with Sunflowers, this Sunflower is among the works in which the flower-garden landscape comes closest to the figure paintings, the plant standing in for the human. The Belvedere holds it among the landscapes.

What to look at

The single great sunflower, frontal and central, its dark leaves like a robe; the dense field of smaller flowers around it; the all-over shimmer. Then the reading — the flower as a standing figure, the landscape verging on allegory.

The Attersee landscapes

Klimt's landscapes — some fifty of them, a quarter of the painted œuvre — were made almost entirely in the summers at the Attersee with Emilie Flöge and her family, away from the Vienna of the commissions and the scandals, and they are the least-known and, in the modern estimate, among the most admired part of his work. Almost all are square, close-cropped, sky-excluded; they dissolve the scene into a dense, all-over, patterned surface, the pointillé dab building a field as flat and shimmering as the gold of the portraits. Unpeopled and serene, they are the counterpart to the anxious, erotic figure paintings, and increasingly they are held to be the equal of the more famous gold.

Flatness and the modern eye

The landscapes' radical flatness — the excluded sky, the eliminated middle distance, the all-over field of dabbed colour pressed against the plane — has made them, in the modern estimate, among the most forward-looking of Klimt's works, anticipating by pure looking the concerns of a later, abstract art. Klimt achieved it with a cropping viewfinder or opera-glass, isolating the motif and bringing it flat to the picture surface; the result is at once a faithful image of a particular place and season and a near-abstract pattern of colour. This is the landscape's quiet radicalism, the same dissolution of the object into decorative surface that the portraits apply to the woman.

Coda

Sunflower is the most anthropomorphic of Klimt's flower-pieces — a single great plant, frontal and robed in its dark leaves, that reads as a veiled standing figure, the landscape verging on the allegory of The Kiss. In the Belvedere, it is one of the most striking of the garden landscapes, the flower charged with the sensual meaning of Klimt's human figures.

The picture

Oil and gold leaf on canvas, 180 × 180 cm — Belvedere, Vienna. Two lovers kneel at the edge of a flowered meadow that ends in gold: a man, his head crowned with ivy, bends the woman's face to his and kisses her cheek; she kneels into him, her eyes closed, her face turned up, one hand curled over his; and the two bodies are fused into a single towering golden form, distinguished only by their patterns — his robe of black-and-white rectangles, hers of coloured circles and flowers. Her feet, adorned with flowers, curl over the very edge of the flowered ground, at the brink of the golden void. It is the summit of the golden style, the most famous work of Austrian art, and one of the most reproduced images in the world.

The subject

The Kiss is Klimt's most complete statement of his central theme: the human — desire, tenderness, union — dissolved into ornament and set at the edge of the abyss. The two lovers are barely individual; they are a single golden monolith, a column of gold rising from the flowered meadow, and their humanity is concentrated in the few passages of modelled flesh — his hands on her face and head, her face, her hand over his, her feet. Everything else is pattern and gold. The man's rectangles and the woman's circles have been read as the male and the female, the active and the receptive, the two dissolved into one; the ivy crown and the flowers are the ancient signs of love and fertility; the gold is the eternal, the sacred, the precious. And the woman's feet at the edge of the ground — the flowered meadow simply stopping, giving way to gold nothingness — are the note of the abyss that runs through all Klimt: the union is perfect, and it is poised at the brink.

The golden summit

The picture fuses everything Klimt's golden decade had developed. The Byzantine gold ground of Judith; the dissolution of the body into ornament of the gold Adele; the eroticism of Danaë; the Expectation and Fulfilment of the Stoclet Frieze (the embracing couple of the frieze is The Kiss's direct sibling); the flowered meadow of the Attersee landscapes. It is the resolution of the whole tension of Klimt's art — the easel and the surface, the meaning and the ornament, the fine and the applied — in a single, unrepeatable balance. The Austrian state bought it from the Kunstschau of 1908, before it was even finished, and it has been the centre of the Belvedere, and of the Klimt world, ever since.

The ubiquity, and seeing it fresh

The Kiss is the victim of its own success: reproduced on every poster, mug, scarf and umbrella, it has become almost impossible to see, worn smooth by familiarity into a symbol of romantic love simply. But the reproductions lose everything that matters — the real gold leaf, which catches and throws light so that the picture shifts and glitters as one moves; the scale, nearly two metres square, so that the golden column of the lovers looms; and the edge, the flowered feet at the brink of the void, which reproduction crops or flattens. Seen fresh, in the Belvedere, at its true size and in its real gold, The Kiss is not a Valentine but an overwhelming thing — a real gold, a real tenderness, and a real edge, the human held for a moment, perfectly, over the abyss.

What to look at

The fused golden column of the two bodies; the modelled flesh — his hands, her face, her hand over his, her feet; the man's rectangles and the woman's circles; the ivy crown; the flowered meadow; and, above all, the edge — the woman's feet curled over the brink where the flowers stop and the gold nothingness begins. Then step to the side and move, and watch the gold come alive.

Coda

The Kiss is the summit of Klimt and of the golden style — the human dissolved into ornament, the erotic made sacred and the sacred erotic, the perfect union poised at the edge of the void. It is the most reproduced image in modern art, and it has survived its ubiquity: at its true scale, in its real gold, in the Belvedere, it remains overwhelming, the beautiful surface of a doomed civilisation laid, knowingly, over the abyss.

The couple and the patterns

The distinction between the two lovers is made entirely by pattern, and the patterns have been endlessly read. The man's robe is a field of black-and-white and grey rectangles — hard, upright, geometric, 'masculine'; the woman's is a field of coloured circles, ovals and flowers — soft, round, organic, 'feminine'; and where the two robes meet and overlap, the patterns interpenetrate, the union of the sexes figured in the mingling of the geometric and the organic. The reading is almost too neat, and Klimt surely intended it: the whole golden style is a language of ornament, and here the ornament carries the picture's meaning, the two principles of the world dissolved into one golden form. The ivy in the man's hair and the flowers in the woman's and at her feet are the ancient signs of fidelity and fertility; the gold is eternity.

The edge, and the abyss

The single most important thing in The Kiss, and the thing reproduction always loses, is the edge. The lovers kneel on a small patch of flowered meadow — the millefleurs of medieval tapestry, the flowered ground of the Attersee landscapes — and that patch simply stops: beyond and below it is gold, nothing, void. The woman's feet, adorned with flowers, curl over the very brink, at the edge of the golden nothing. The union is perfect, and it is poised at the abyss; the tenderness is real, and it is surrounded by, laid over, about to give way to, the void. This is Klimt's deepest theme — the beautiful surface over the abyss — made literal in the picture's composition, and it is why The Kiss is not, finally, a Valentine but something graver: an image of the human holding to the human, in love, at the edge of the dark. The gold that seems all splendour is also all emptiness; the meadow is a small bright thing at the brink.

The Stoclet Frieze and the sources

The Kiss is the culmination of a sequence. The embracing couple of Fulfilment in the Stoclet Frieze (1905–11) is its direct sibling — the same fused pair, the same dissolution into golden ornament — and the Beethoven Frieze's final embrace ('This Kiss to the Whole World', 1902) is its ancestor. Behind all three lie the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna, the gold-ground icon, the medieval millefleurs tapestry, and the Japanese decorative field; and behind them, the age's cult of love as the one redemption, Wagner's and Schiller's 'kiss to the whole world'. The Kiss gathers all of it into a single easel painting — the frieze made portable, the mural become an icon.

The state, the Kunstschau, and the fame

The Austrian state bought The Kiss from the Kunstschau of 1908 — the exhibition Klimt organised after leaving the Secession — before it was even finished, for the Moderne Galerie (later the Belvedere), an unusually decisive act of official patronage for a painter whose public work had been the scandal of the University pictures a few years before. It has been the centre of the Belvedere, and the most beloved object in Austria, ever since, and through reproduction it has become one of the two or three most familiar images in the world. Its ubiquity — the posters, the mugs, the endless merchandise — has made it a byword for romantic love and nearly impossible to see; but the ubiquity is itself a measure of the picture's power, the reach of an image that speaks, past all its reproductions, to the desire to hold and be held.

What to look at

The fused golden column of the two bodies; the modelled flesh — his hands cradling her face and head, her face turned up with closed eyes, her hand curled over his, her flowered feet; the man's rectangles and the woman's circles interpenetrating; the ivy and the flowers; the millefleurs meadow; and, above all, the edge where the flowers stop and the gold void begins. Move to the side and watch the real gold leaf catch the light. Then see that the most famous image of love in the world is also an image of love at the edge of the abyss.

The dissolution of the figure

The Kiss is the furthest Klimt took the dissolution of the human figure into ornament while keeping it human. The two bodies are almost entirely subsumed into the single golden robe-form — one cannot see where his body ends and hers begins, only the two patterns and the few passages of flesh — and yet the picture is overwhelmingly about the human: the tenderness of the man's hands on the woman's face, the surrender of her upturned closed-eyed face, the small human gesture of her hand curled over his. The genius of the picture is this balance — the near-total dissolution into gold and pattern, and the intense concentration of feeling into the few square inches of flesh that remain. Push the dissolution any further and the picture becomes pure decoration; hold it exactly here, and it becomes the most moving image of union in modern art.

The scale and the gold

At 180 centimetres square the picture is nearly monumental, and the scale is essential: the golden column of the lovers looms over the viewer, and the real gold leaf — applied and tooled over much of the surface — makes the picture a shifting, living thing that reproduction cannot convey. The gold catches and throws light; move before it and it glitters and changes; it is an object, a precious thing, an icon, as much as an image. This is the golden style's origin in the icon and the mosaic made fully monumental: the easel painting become a golden altarpiece, but an altarpiece to human love rather than to God — or rather, an altarpiece in which human love has become the god, set in the gold once reserved for the sacred, and poised, like everything Klimt made, at the edge of the void.

Coda

The Kiss is the summit of Klimt and the emblem of his whole art: the human dissolved into the most beautiful ornament modern painting made, the erotic and the sacred fused, the perfect union poised at the edge of the void. It has become the most reproduced image in the world, worn nearly to invisibility by its own fame; and it survives even that, because what it says — that love is a small bright thing held at the brink of the dark, and worth holding — is true, and the gold both exalts the holding and names the dark around it. Seen at its true scale, in its real gold, in the Belvedere, it is not a Valentine but a vision: the beautiful, doomed surface of a civilisation, and two human figures holding to each other at the edge of everything.

The place in the œuvre

The Kiss stands at the exact centre of Klimt's career and his art — the resolution of the golden decade, painted at its height in 1907–08, the summation of everything the gold had been building toward and the last of the great golden pictures before the turn to colour. After it, the gold recedes; the late portraits and landscapes replace it with the hot colour-fields of the final decade. So The Kiss is both a summit and a farewell: the golden style at its fullest and its last, the point after which Klimt, having said everything the gold could say, moved on. That the picture the whole world knows as 'a Klimt' should be this pivotal, unrepeatable thing — the balance of a decade held for one moment — is fitting; it is the centre from which the rest of the œuvre is read. It is the picture with which this catalogue's Klimt begins and ends: the image the world means by his name, and the one in which everything he was — the gilder's son, the decorator, the Secessionist, the painter of the woman and the abyss — is gathered into a single golden square.

The picture

A near-square landscape of a summer meadow in full flower — a dense, all-over field of grass and blossom in greens, whites, reds and golds, filling the whole square, the sky excluded, the flowers pressed flat against the plane. One of the flower-meadow landscapes, close in spirit to the Cottage Garden and the Poppy Field. — private collection.

The subject

The Blossoming Meadow is the open field turned into a tapestry of flowers: the grass and blossoms fill the square in a shimmering mosaic of dabbed colour, without sky, horizon or focal point, the particular flowers dissolved into an overall field. It is among the most purely decorative of the landscapes — very nearly an abstraction, a field of colour — and among the most joyous, the summer meadow at its fullest. With the Cottage Garden, the Poppy Field and the Farm Garden with Sunflowers it forms the group of flower-field pictures that are the hottest and most colourful of the Attersee landscapes.

Context and reception

The flower-field landscapes are among the most reproduced and most valued of Klimt's works, and they show the landscape manner at its most exuberant — the shimmering all-over field turned from the cool woods and lakes to the riot of summer blossom. They are, in their flatness and their dissolution of the motif into pure pattern, among the most radical pictures of their date, and, in their colour and joy, among the most immediately loved.

What to look at

The dense field of grass and blossom filling the square; the greens, whites, reds and golds; the excluded sky; the near-abstraction. Then the meadow dissolved into an all-over tapestry of colour.

The Attersee landscapes

Klimt's landscapes — some fifty of them, a quarter of the painted œuvre — were made almost entirely in the summers at the Attersee with Emilie Flöge and her family, away from the Vienna of the commissions and the scandals, and they are the least-known and, in the modern estimate, among the most admired part of his work. Almost all are square, close-cropped, sky-excluded; they dissolve the scene into a dense, all-over, patterned surface, the pointillé dab building a field as flat and shimmering as the gold of the portraits. Unpeopled and serene, they are the counterpart to the anxious, erotic figure paintings, and increasingly they are held to be the equal of the more famous gold.

Flatness and the modern eye

The landscapes' radical flatness — the excluded sky, the eliminated middle distance, the all-over field of dabbed colour pressed against the plane — has made them, in the modern estimate, among the most forward-looking of Klimt's works, anticipating by pure looking the concerns of a later, abstract art. Klimt achieved it with a cropping viewfinder or opera-glass, isolating the motif and bringing it flat to the picture surface; the result is at once a faithful image of a particular place and season and a near-abstract pattern of colour. This is the landscape's quiet radicalism, the same dissolution of the object into decorative surface that the portraits apply to the woman.

Coda

Blossoming Meadow is one of Klimt's flower-field landscapes — the summer meadow turned into a shimmering, all-over tapestry of grass and blossom, very nearly abstract. It belongs with the Cottage Garden and the Poppy Field among the hottest and most joyous of the Attersee pictures, the landscape method at its most exuberant.

The picture

A landscape of the castle of Kammer on the Attersee, seen across the water so that it seems to rise from the lake — the 'water castle' — its reflection and the surrounding trees dissolved into a shimmering, all-over field, the sky reduced to a thin band. One of the series of Schloss Kammer landscapes Klimt painted in the Attersee summers. — National Gallery Prague.

The subject

Schloss Kammer, the castle on the lake near Klimt's summer quarters, was one of his favourite motifs, and he painted it several times from the water and from the park. Here it is seen across the lake, rising from its own reflection, the whole scene — castle, trees, water — brought flat against the plane in the characteristic manner, the depth denied, the surface a shimmer of dabbed colour. The castle's walls and windows give the picture its one note of architectural regularity amid the dissolving foliage and water, and the reflection doubles the composition. It is one of the loveliest of the architectural landscapes.

Context and reception

The Schloss Kammer pictures — the castle from the water, the avenue in its park, the park itself — form a distinct group among the Attersee landscapes, in which Klimt turned his flattening method on architecture as well as nature. The National Gallery in Prague holds this one, one of several major Klimt landscapes in the Czech collections (with The Maiden), a legacy of the close ties between Vienna and Prague in the last years of the empire.

What to look at

The castle rising from the lake and its reflection; the trees and water dissolved into shimmer; the thin band of sky; the one note of architectural regularity in the dissolving field. Then the reflection doubling the composition.

The architectural landscapes

Among the Attersee landscapes, the pictures of buildings by the water — the castle of Kammer, the houses of Unterach and Litzlberg, the forester's house — form a distinct group, in which Klimt turned his flattening method on architecture as well as nature. The regular facade, the windows, the roofline give these pictures a coloured geometry, a grid of the man-made, set against the dissolving shimmer of foliage and water; and where the building is seen across the lake, its reflection doubles the composition. They are among the most colourful and structured of the landscapes, and they show the same radical pressing of the scene flat against the plane, the depth denied, that runs through the whole landscape œuvre.

Flatness and the modern eye

The landscapes' radical flatness — the excluded sky, the eliminated middle distance, the all-over field of dabbed colour pressed against the plane — has made them, in the modern estimate, among the most forward-looking of Klimt's works, anticipating by pure looking the concerns of a later, abstract art. Klimt achieved it with a cropping viewfinder or opera-glass, isolating the motif and bringing it flat to the picture surface; the result is at once a faithful image of a particular place and season and a near-abstract pattern of colour. This is the landscape's quiet radicalism, the same dissolution of the object into decorative surface that the portraits apply to the woman.

Coda

Water Castle is one of Klimt's Schloss Kammer landscapes — the lakeside castle seen across the water, rising from its own reflection, the whole dissolved into a shimmering all-over field. In the National Gallery in Prague, it is one of the loveliest of the architectural landscapes, the flattening method turned on the castle as on the woods and lakes.

Schloss Kammer on the Attersee II (private collection): one of the series of the castle of Kammer seen across the water, dissolved into a shimmering field with its reflection — a companion to the Water Castle and the other Kammer pictures.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 69 × 55 cm. A bust-length of a young woman in a large hat and a feather boa, her face turned in near-profile, glimpsed as if in passing against a dark ground. One of the most modern and intimate of Klimt's portraits, close to the fashion image and to the momentary glimpse. — private collection.

The subject

The picture is unusual among Klimt's portraits for its air of the momentary and the anonymous: the woman, in her hat and feather boa, is caught in near-profile, glimpsed as if on the street or in a crowd, the face half-turned, the ground dark and undefined. It has the quality of a snapshot or a fashion plate, and it is among the sparest and most modern of Klimt's portraits, without gold or dense ornament, the drama carried by the hat and the boa and the fugitive glance. It belongs to the years around 1909–10 when Klimt's portraiture was moving toward a sparer, more modern manner.

Context and reception

The picture reflects the influence of the modern fashion image and, perhaps, of photography and of the younger Viennese painters; it is one of several Klimt portraits of fashionable women in striking hats of these years. Its intimacy and its air of the passing moment distinguish it from the hieratic golden portraits and the grand late colour portraits alike; it is a glimpse rather than an icon.

What to look at

The large hat and the feather boa; the near-profile, half-turned face; the dark, undefined ground; the air of the momentary glimpse. Then the modernity — the fashion image, the snapshot, the fugitive glance.

The late portraits

After about 1909 Klimt's portraiture abandoned the gold for dense fields of hot, high-keyed colour and East Asian and folk ornament, and the late portraits — set the sitter against a wall of pattern, the modelled face and hands the island of flesh in the decorative field — are, to many, the equal of the golden ones. Drawn from the Chinese, Japanese, Korean and folk art Klimt collected and hung in his studio, the ornament is now figurative — horsemen, phoenixes, flowers, figures — rather than the abstract gold of the earlier portraits. Many of the last portraits were left unfinished at his death in 1918, the faces done and the fields of colour begun, and they show the late method laid bare.

The woman and the ornament

The late portraits, like the golden ones, are built on the tension between the modelled, realistic face and hands and the flat, ornamental field that surrounds and nearly engulfs them — the island of flesh in the sea of pattern. What changes in the late work is the field: the abstract gold of the golden portraits becomes the figurative colour of the late ones, the Chinese horsemen and phoenixes and flowers of Klimt's own collection, in a hot, high-keyed palette. The woman remains the subject and the centre, her character concentrated in the face amid the decorative splendour, and the sequence of these portraits is the collective image of a class — cultivated, wealthy, largely Jewish, soon to be destroyed — seen through its women.

Coda

Lady with Hat and Feather Boa is among the most modern and intimate of Klimt's portraits — a fashionable young woman glimpsed in near-profile, as if in passing, without gold or ornament. Close to the fashion image and the snapshot, it is a glimpse rather than an icon, one of the sparer portraits of the years when Klimt's manner was turning modern.

Family (Die Familie) (Belvedere): a sombre picture of a huddled family — a man, a woman and a child — wrapped together in the dark, one of Klimt's few images of the family and one of his darkest, closer to the Expressionism of the younger Viennese than to the golden splendour.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 178 × 46 cm. A tall, narrow panel: a woman, half-naked, her breasts bared, her hands become clawed talons gripping the hair of a severed head at the lower edge, her body twisted and agitated, set in a field of gold and coloured ornament. The sequel to Judith I of 1901, and a very different image of the same fusion of sex and violence. — Ca' Pesaro (Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna), Venice.

The subject

Where Judith I (1901) was serene in her erotic triumph, Judith II is frenzied: the body is twisted and angular, the hands are talons, the face is averted and strained, the whole figure agitated and disturbing, in the more nervous manner of Klimt's later style. It is the femme fatale at her most frantic — the sex and the killing fused, but now in a key of frenzy rather than languor — and it has often been called Salome, the confusion (as with Judith I) reflecting the difficulty of seeing so sexual and violent a woman as the virtuous biblical heroine. The elongated format, the bared breasts, the clawed hands and the gold ornament make it one of the most unsettling of the golden pictures.

Context and reception

The two Judiths frame the golden decade — the calm devourer of 1901 and the frantic one of 1909 — and mark the change in Klimt's manner across it, from the serene golden icon to the more nervous, agitated late style. Judith II belongs with the femme fatale pictures — Judith I, the Water Serpents, Danaë — as one of Klimt's images of the dangerous, desiring woman, and it is the most disturbing of them. Ca' Pesaro in Venice holds it, one of the major Klimts in Italy.

What to look at

The bared breasts; the clawed, taloned hands gripping the severed head at the lower edge; the twisted, agitated body; the field of gold and coloured ornament. Then the change from Judith I — serenity become frenzy.

The two Judiths and the femme fatale

The femme fatale — the beautiful woman as devourer, sex and death fused in the female — was the great obsession of the European fin de siècle, and nowhere more than in Vienna, the city of Freud and Weininger. Klimt's two Judiths are its central images: the serene golden devourer of 1901 and this frantic, clawed, agitated one of 1909, the same fusion of the erotic and the murderous in two keys, languor and frenzy. They frame the golden decade and mark the change in Klimt's manner across it, from the calm golden icon to the nervous, angular late style. That both were repeatedly miscalled Salome reflects the difficulty of seeing so sexual and violent a woman as the virtuous biblical heroine — which is exactly the disquiet Klimt intended.

Seeing it

Ca' Pesaro, the Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna in Venice, holds Judith II, one of the major Klimts in Italy, acquired for the city's modern collection early; it hangs among the international modern works, its gold and its frenzy a startling presence. With Judith I in the Belvedere it frames the golden decade — the calm devourer and the frantic one — and it is the more disturbing of the two, the femme fatale at her most clawed and agitated.

Coda

Judith II is the frantic sequel to Judith I — the femme fatale now twisted, clawed and agitated, the sex and the killing fused in a key of frenzy rather than languor. Often miscalled Salome, it is the most unsettling of the golden women, and, with the first Judith, it frames the golden decade and marks the turn from the serene golden icon to the nervous late style. It hangs in Ca' Pesaro in Venice.

The picture

A landscape of the park at Schloss Kammer on the Attersee — the trees and the path dissolved into a dense, all-over field of foliage, the trunks rising through the shimmering mass, the sky excluded. One of the Schloss Kammer landscapes and one of the works by which the Neue Galerie holds Klimt. — Neue Galerie, New York.

The subject

The park pictures turn Klimt's flattening method on the ordered planting of a castle park — the avenue of trees, the path, the foliage — and dissolve them into a shimmering, all-over field in which the trunks are the only verticals and the depth is denied. Like the woodland interiors, they press the scene flat against the plane and hold the eye on the surface; the ordered park becomes a dense tapestry of green. It belongs with the Avenue in the Park of Schloss Kammer and the Water Castle to the group of Kammer landscapes, among the most admired of the Attersee series.

Context and reception

The Neue Galerie in New York — Ronald Lauder's museum of German and Austrian art, home of the gold Adele — holds this landscape among its Klimts, one of the major concentrations of the painter outside Vienna. The Schloss Kammer pictures are among the works by which the landscapes have been recognised as central to Klimt's achievement, the serene, unpeopled counterpart to the figure paintings.

What to look at

The trees and path dissolved into a dense field of foliage; the trunks rising through the shimmer; the excluded sky and denied depth. Then the ordered park turned into an all-over tapestry of green.

The Attersee landscapes

Klimt's landscapes — some fifty of them, a quarter of the painted œuvre — were made almost entirely in the summers at the Attersee with Emilie Flöge and her family, away from the Vienna of the commissions and the scandals, and they are the least-known and, in the modern estimate, among the most admired part of his work. Almost all are square, close-cropped, sky-excluded; they dissolve the scene into a dense, all-over, patterned surface, the pointillé dab building a field as flat and shimmering as the gold of the portraits. Unpeopled and serene, they are the counterpart to the anxious, erotic figure paintings, and increasingly they are held to be the equal of the more famous gold.

Flatness and the modern eye

The landscapes' radical flatness — the excluded sky, the eliminated middle distance, the all-over field of dabbed colour pressed against the plane — has made them, in the modern estimate, among the most forward-looking of Klimt's works, anticipating by pure looking the concerns of a later, abstract art. Klimt achieved it with a cropping viewfinder or opera-glass, isolating the motif and bringing it flat to the picture surface; the result is at once a faithful image of a particular place and season and a near-abstract pattern of colour. This is the landscape's quiet radicalism, the same dissolution of the object into decorative surface that the portraits apply to the woman.

Coda

Park at Schloss Kammer is one of Klimt's Kammer landscapes — the castle park dissolved into a shimmering, all-over field of foliage, the trunks the only verticals. In the Neue Galerie in New York, it is one of the works by which the great American collection holds the painter, and one of the most admired of the Attersee series.

The picture

A near-square landscape almost entirely filled by a dense, shimmering mass of foliage — the canopy of the park's trees, rendered as an all-over field of small dabs of green flecked with colour, with only a thin strip of trunks and ground at the very bottom. One of the most radical and most nearly abstract of all Klimt's landscapes. — Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The subject

The Park carries Klimt's landscape method to its extreme: some nine-tenths of the canvas is the flat, shimmering, all-over field of the foliage canopy, a mosaic of dabbed green and gold with no sky, no horizon and only a narrow band of trunks and path at the bottom to anchor it. It is very nearly a pure abstraction — a field of dabbed colour — made a decade before abstraction had a name, and it is among the works most often cited in the account of Klimt as a precursor of the flat, all-over painting of a later age. At the same time it is a faithful, immersive image of standing beneath the canopy of a park in summer.

Context and reception

The Museum of Modern Art in New York holds The Park, and it is fitting that this most nearly abstract of Klimt's landscapes should be in the museum that made the history of abstraction its story: the picture is one of the works by which Klimt's radicalism, long hidden behind the fame of the gold, has been recognised. It belongs with On Lake Attersee, Island in the Attersee and Rosebushes under the Trees to the group in which the landscape is pushed furthest toward pure surface.

What to look at

The dense shimmering canopy of foliage filling nine-tenths of the square; the thin band of trunks and ground at the bottom; the near-total abstraction. Then the immersion — the sense of standing beneath the summer canopy — within the flat field of dabbed colour.

The Attersee landscapes

Klimt's landscapes — some fifty of them, a quarter of the painted œuvre — were made almost entirely in the summers at the Attersee with Emilie Flöge and her family, away from the Vienna of the commissions and the scandals, and they are the least-known and, in the modern estimate, among the most admired part of his work. Almost all are square, close-cropped, sky-excluded; they dissolve the scene into a dense, all-over, patterned surface, the pointillé dab building a field as flat and shimmering as the gold of the portraits. Unpeopled and serene, they are the counterpart to the anxious, erotic figure paintings, and increasingly they are held to be the equal of the more famous gold.

Coda

The Park is the most nearly abstract of all Klimt's landscapes — a shimmering all-over field of foliage filling the canvas, a mosaic of dabbed green with the barest anchor of trunks below. In MoMA, the museum of abstraction's history, it stands as the fullest evidence of Klimt's radicalism, the landscape pushed to the edge of pure surface a decade before abstraction had a name.

The picture

The cartoon for the central Tree of Life of the Stoclet Frieze — a great swirling golden tree, its branches curling into spirals across the wall, birds and flowers among them, the whole a field of gold and ornament. Mixed media with gold and silver on paper; one of the nine Stoclet cartoons in the MAK. — MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna.

The subject

The Tree of Life is the central motif of the Stoclet Frieze, filling the long walls between the figures of Expectation and Fulfilment — a great stylised tree whose branches curl into the spiral 'eye' forms that are Klimt's signature ornament, with birds (a hawk among them) and flowers worked into the golden field. The tree of life is an ancient symbol — of generation, continuity, the cosmos — and Klimt's version, all spiral and gold, is one of the great decorative inventions of the age, the linking device of his one surviving monumental scheme. The MAK's cartoon is the full-scale design from which the Werkstätte executed the mosaic.

Context and reception

With Expectation and Fulfilment, the Tree of Life completes the record, in the MAK's cartoons, of Klimt's greatest decorative commission. The spiral branches are the fullest flowering of the ornamental vocabulary — Mycenaean spiral, Egyptian eye, Byzantine gold — that fills the golden pictures; here it is given its own subject, the cosmic tree, and its own monumental scale. The nine Stoclet cartoons are among the treasures of the museum of applied arts, at the heart of the Werkstätte world.

What to look at

The great swirling golden tree; the branches curling into spirals and 'eyes'; the birds and flowers in the golden field; the gold and silver of the cartoon. Then the tree of life as the linking device of Klimt's one surviving monumental scheme.

The ornament of the golden style

The Tree of Life's curling branches are the fullest flowering of the ornamental vocabulary that fills all the golden pictures — the spiral (Mycenaean), the eye (Egyptian), the gold ground (Byzantine), the geometric grid (Wiener Werkstätte) — a synthesis of the world's decorative traditions that Klimt gathered deliberately and deployed around the modern figure. In the Stoclet Frieze that vocabulary is given its own subject, the cosmic tree of generation and continuity, and its own monumental scale, executed in gold and stone. The nine surviving cartoons in the MAK are the fullest record of Klimt's greatest decorative commission and of the ornamental language at its most developed.

On paper

Like Fulfilment and Expectation, the Tree of Life survives as a full-scale cartoon in the MAK, one of the nine Stoclet designs that are the fullest record of Klimt's greatest decorative commission. Executed in gouache, gold and silver, it is a finished and beautiful work on paper, and the design from which the swirling golden tree of the Brussels dining-room was made in marble, enamel and stone.

Coda

The Tree of Life is the central motif of the Stoclet Frieze — a great swirling golden tree of curling spirals and 'eyes', the ancient symbol of generation and cosmos — preserved as a cartoon in the MAK. It is one of Klimt's supreme decorative inventions and the linking device of his one surviving monumental decoration, the ornamental vocabulary of the golden style given its own subject and scale.

Schloss Kammer on the Attersee III (Belvedere): one of the finest of the Kammer series — the castle seen close across the water, rising from its reflection among the trees, dissolved into a shimmering flat field. The Belvedere's picture is among the most admired of the architectural landscapes.

Schloss Kammer on the Attersee IV (private collection): another of the series of the castle of Kammer, seen across the water; one of the Kammer landscapes of the late Attersee summers.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 178 × 198 cm — Leopold Museum, Vienna. At the right, a dense column of the living — infants, children, lovers, a mother, an old woman — sleeps and dreams, their bodies wrapped and overlaid with a field of bright coloured ornament, crosses and circles and flowers; at the left, separated by a band of dark, stands the grinning skeleton of Death, robed in a garment of blue crosses, a club or cudgel in his hands, leaning in toward the sleeping column and watching. Klimt's most explicit statement of his lifelong theme.

The subject and the structure

Death and Life is the whole of Klimt in one composition: the beautiful, patterned, ornamented column of life — every age of the human, from the infant to the crone, wrapped in the decorative surface — and, at its edge, watching, the figure of Death. The structure is the structure of all his major pictures: the surface of life laid over, or beside, the void; the ornament and the abyss. The living do not see Death; they sleep, dream, embrace, absorbed in the field of colour that wraps them; Death waits at the margin, patient, grinning. It is the most direct and the most monumental of Klimt's allegories of mortality, and it gathers the themes of the University Medicine (destroyed), the Three Ages and the Hope pictures into a single image.

The turn from gold

Klimt worked on the picture for years and, around 1915, changed its ground from gold to the dense grey-blue it now has — a deliberate mark of his turn from the golden style to the colour of the late work. The column of the living is a field of the hot, bright, mosaic-like colour of the late portraits and landscapes; the gold has gone, and the picture is the richer and the graver for it. It won first prize at the Rome international exhibition of 1911 (in an earlier, partly golden state) and is one of the central works of the Leopold Museum.

What to look at

The column of the living — find the infant, the lovers, the mother, the old woman; the field of coloured ornament that wraps them; the band of dark that separates them from Death; the grinning skeleton in his robe of crosses, the club in his hands, leaning in to watch. Then the structure — life as the beautiful ornamented column, death as the watcher at its edge — which is the structure of Klimt's whole art.

Coda

Death and Life is Klimt's most explicit and most monumental statement of his central theme — the beautiful, patterned column of life, watched from its edge by the grinning figure of Death. It gathers the mortality that runs through all his work into a single image, and its turn from gold to colour marks the passage to his late style. It is the summing-up of everything the gold had laid over the abyss, with the abyss now named and given a face.

The living, in detail

The column of the living repays a close look, for it is a compendium of Klimt's figures: at the top, an infant and a small child; below them a young woman, her face serene; a pair of lovers; a mother with her child; a powerful man; and, at the base, an old woman, bowed — the whole span of life, from the infant to the crone, stacked into a single dreaming, sleeping mass and wrapped in the bright field of ornament, the crosses and circles and flowers of the late colour. They are absorbed in themselves, eyes closed, unaware; life, in Klimt, does not look at death. The figures are drawn from the whole repertory of the allegories — the Three Ages, the Hope pictures, the University Medicine — gathered here into their fullest ensemble.

Death, and the reworking

The figure of Death — the grinning skeleton in a robe patterned with blue crosses, a heavy club in his hands, leaning in from the left across the band of dark that separates him from the living — is one of Klimt's few male figures and his only major image of Death personified. Klimt reworked the picture over years, and the change of the ground from gold (in the version that won at Rome in 1911) to the dense grey-blue it now bears is the visible mark of his turn from the golden style; the reworking made the picture graver and colder, the gold's splendour replaced by the blue-grey of the void. It is the summing-up of his art — the ornamented column of life, the watching figure of death — and one of the central works of the Leopold Museum, the museum that holds the largest Klimt and Schiele collection.

The two states

The picture exists, in effect, in the memory of two states: the version that won the gold medal at the Rome international exhibition of 1911, which had a gold ground, and the reworked version of about 1915, in which Klimt replaced the gold with the dense grey-blue it now bears. The change is documented in photographs and is one of the clearest records of his turn from the golden to the late colour manner — the same composition, the gold splendour exchanged for a colder, graver blue-grey. That Klimt chose to darken his great allegory of death, to strip its gold, is itself eloquent: the late manner is soberer than the golden, and Death and Life is where the sobering is caught in the act.

Coda

Death and Life is Klimt's great summing-up — the ornamented column of life, every age of the human wrapped in bright pattern, and the grinning figure of Death watching from its edge across a band of dark. It gathers the mortality that runs through all his work into a single monumental image, and its reworking from gold to grey-blue marks the passage from the golden phase to the late colour. It is the structure of his whole art made explicit: the beautiful surface of life, and the void that watches it. The Leopold Museum, which holds it, is built on the collection of Rudolf Leopold, the great gatherer of Klimt and Schiele, and Death and Life is among its central treasures — the picture in which Klimt's lifelong theme is stated whole.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 140 × 140 cm. A square portrait of Marie Henneberg, wife of a photographer and Secession supporter, seated in a soft dress against a shimmering pale-violet ground. A portrait of the early golden years, and one of the few major Klimts in a German public collection. — Kunstmuseum Moritzburg, Halle.

The subject

The Marie Henneberg is a portrait of the transitional years — the sitter seated in a soft, dissolving dress against a ground of shimmering pale violet flecked with ornament, the face modelled with care, the decorative flattening present but not yet dominant. The square format and the delicate, near-monochrome harmony of violet and white make it one of the subtlest of the early portraits. Marie Henneberg and her husband Hugo, a pioneer of art photography, were part of the Secession circle, and the portrait is a document of that world of patrons and supporters.

Context and reception

The Moritzburg museum in Halle holds the portrait, one of the few major Klimts in a German public collection; it was among the works confiscated as 'degenerate' or otherwise displaced in the Nazi years and later restored to public display. It belongs to the sequence of society portraits of the golden years, and its delicate colour harmony makes it one of the loveliest of the transitional group, between the naturalistic early portraits and the golden ones.

What to look at

The seated figure in her soft dress; the shimmering pale-violet ground; the delicate near-monochrome harmony; the carefully modelled face. Then the transitional manner — the decorative flattening present, not yet dominant.

The late portraits

After about 1909 Klimt's portraiture abandoned the gold for dense fields of hot, high-keyed colour and East Asian and folk ornament, and the late portraits — set the sitter against a wall of pattern, the modelled face and hands the island of flesh in the decorative field — are, to many, the equal of the golden ones. Drawn from the Chinese, Japanese, Korean and folk art Klimt collected and hung in his studio, the ornament is now figurative — horsemen, phoenixes, flowers, figures — rather than the abstract gold of the earlier portraits. Many of the last portraits were left unfinished at his death in 1918, the faces done and the fields of colour begun, and they show the late method laid bare.

The woman and the ornament

The late portraits, like the golden ones, are built on the tension between the modelled, realistic face and hands and the flat, ornamental field that surrounds and nearly engulfs them — the island of flesh in the sea of pattern. What changes in the late work is the field: the abstract gold of the golden portraits becomes the figurative colour of the late ones, the Chinese horsemen and phoenixes and flowers of Klimt's own collection, in a hot, high-keyed palette. The woman remains the subject and the centre, her character concentrated in the face amid the decorative splendour, and the sequence of these portraits is the collective image of a class — cultivated, wealthy, largely Jewish, soon to be destroyed — seen through its women.

Coda

The Portrait of Marie Henneberg is one of the subtlest of Klimt's early golden-years portraits — a Secession supporter's wife in a soft dress against a shimmering violet ground — and one of the few major Klimts in a German public collection, in the Moritzburg museum at Halle. Its delicate colour harmony marks the moment between the naturalistic portraits and the gold.

Portrait of Paula Zuckerkandl (private collection): a society portrait of a member of the Zuckerkandl family, among Klimt's patrons and supporters, of the years around 1910.

Rosebush (private collection): an Attersee landscape of a rosebush in bloom, dissolved into a dense field of green flecked with blossom, in the flat, all-over manner.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 79 × 63 cm. A bust-length of a young woman in a great black feathered hat, her face pale and turned to the viewer, against a muted ground. A portrait of the years around 1910, in the transitional manner between the gold and the full late colour. — private collection.

The subject

The picture is one of Klimt's more intimate portraits, a fashionable young woman in a dramatic black hat, the face pale and the treatment relatively restrained — no gold, no dense wall of ornament, the influence perhaps of the modern fashion plate and of Klimt's contemporaries Schiele and Kokoschka, whose portraits were sparer. The great black feathered hat is the picture's drama, framing and shadowing the pale face; it belongs to the moment around 1910 when Klimt was moving from the gold toward the colour of the late portraits, and when the young Expressionists were changing the terms of Viennese portraiture around him.

Context and reception

The years around 1910 are a hinge in Klimt's portraiture, between the golden icons and the colour-drenched late portraits, and pictures like The Black Feathered Hat show a sparer, more modern manner — the fashionable woman, the dramatic accessory, the restrained ground — that reflects both the international fashion image and the pressure of the younger generation. It is one of several Klimt portraits of women in striking hats of these years, and one of the more intimate.

What to look at

The great black feathered hat framing the pale face; the restrained ground; the fashionable young woman. Then the transitional manner — no gold, no dense ornament, the sparer modern portrait.

The late portraits

After about 1909 Klimt's portraiture abandoned the gold for dense fields of hot, high-keyed colour and East Asian and folk ornament, and the late portraits — set the sitter against a wall of pattern, the modelled face and hands the island of flesh in the decorative field — are, to many, the equal of the golden ones. Drawn from the Chinese, Japanese, Korean and folk art Klimt collected and hung in his studio, the ornament is now figurative — horsemen, phoenixes, flowers, figures — rather than the abstract gold of the earlier portraits. Many of the last portraits were left unfinished at his death in 1918, the faces done and the fields of colour begun, and they show the late method laid bare.

The woman and the ornament

The late portraits, like the golden ones, are built on the tension between the modelled, realistic face and hands and the flat, ornamental field that surrounds and nearly engulfs them — the island of flesh in the sea of pattern. What changes in the late work is the field: the abstract gold of the golden portraits becomes the figurative colour of the late ones, the Chinese horsemen and phoenixes and flowers of Klimt's own collection, in a hot, high-keyed palette. The woman remains the subject and the centre, her character concentrated in the face amid the decorative splendour, and the sequence of these portraits is the collective image of a class — cultivated, wealthy, largely Jewish, soon to be destroyed — seen through its women.

Coda

The Black Feathered Hat is an intimate Klimt portrait of about 1910 — a fashionable young woman in a dramatic black hat, in the sparer manner between the gold and the late colour. It reflects both the modern fashion image and the pressure of the young Expressionists, and it is one of the more restrained and modern of Klimt's portraits of women.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 180 × 90 cm. A full-length of a young woman — a dancer, or a posthumous idealised portrait of Ria Munk — standing in a loose robe against a dense wall of East Asian ornament, flowers and figures, in the hot colour of the late style. One of the late colour portraits, and one bound up with the tragic Munk commissions. — private collection.

The subject

The Dancer is a late colour picture in the fullest manner — the standing young woman set against a wall of Chinese and Japanese motif, flowers, birds and figures, in the high-keyed colour that replaced the gold. It is thought to have begun as one of the several attempts to paint Ria Munk, a young woman who killed herself in 1911 and whose grieving family commissioned Klimt to make a memorial portrait; Klimt reworked the picture, and it became less a likeness than an idealised figure, a dancer in a field of flowers. It belongs with the second Adele, the Beer and the Lady with a Fan to the great sequence of late colour pictures.

Context and reception

The Ria Munk commissions are among the most poignant of the late works: three times Klimt attempted the portrait of the dead girl, and the pictures moved further from likeness toward idealised allegory each time. The Dancer is the fullest realised of them, transformed from a memorial into a celebration of youth and colour. Its history — the suicide, the grieving family, the reworked memorial — is one of the sadder stories among the late pictures, and the hot, joyous colour is the more affecting for it.

What to look at

The standing young woman in her loose robe; the dense wall of East Asian flowers, birds and figures; the hot colour of the late style. Then the history — the memorial to a dead girl, transformed into a dancer in a field of flowers.

The late portraits

After about 1909 Klimt's portraiture abandoned the gold for dense fields of hot, high-keyed colour and East Asian and folk ornament, and the late portraits — set the sitter against a wall of pattern, the modelled face and hands the island of flesh in the decorative field — are, to many, the equal of the golden ones. Drawn from the Chinese, Japanese, Korean and folk art Klimt collected and hung in his studio, the ornament is now figurative — horsemen, phoenixes, flowers, figures — rather than the abstract gold of the earlier portraits. Many of the last portraits were left unfinished at his death in 1918, the faces done and the fields of colour begun, and they show the late method laid bare.

Coda

The Dancer is one of the fullest of Klimt's late colour pictures — a young woman against a brilliant wall of East Asian ornament — and one bound up with the tragic Ria Munk commissions, a memorial to a girl who took her own life, reworked into an idealised celebration of youth. Hot, joyous and poignant, it belongs with the great late portraits.

Cottage Garden with Crucifix (Bauerngarten mit Kruzifix) (destroyed 1945; formerly Belvedere): a flower-garden landscape with a wayside crucifix among the blossom; burned at Schloss Immendorf in 1945, surviving in reproduction — one of the losses of that fire.

Expectation (Stoclet Frieze, detail) (MAK – Museum of Applied Arts): the standing dancer Expectation, one of the two figures flanking the Tree of Life in the Stoclet Frieze (see the entries on the Stoclet Frieze and the Tree of Life); a cartoon in the MAK.

Farmhouse in Upper Austria (private collection): an Attersee landscape of a farmhouse and its garden, dissolved into a dense, shimmering field of foliage and flowers, in the late colour manner.