The catalogue — paintings in chronological order, each with a commentary.
149 works by the painter and workshop · 18 copies and works after · 60,658 words of commentary · Part 4 of 6 · 1911–1917
Upper Austrian Farmhouse (Oberösterreichisches Bauernhaus) (Belvedere): an Attersee landscape of a farmhouse, its facade and garden pressed flat into a dense shimmering field; one of the house-and-garden landscapes of the late summers.
Major work · 13 language editions Q4681871 Wikipedia
Oil on canvas, 190 × 120 cm — private collection (formerly Neue Galerie / Oprah Winfrey; sold 2023). A full-length of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the sitter of the famous gold portrait of 1907, painted again five years later in the wholly changed manner of Klimt's late style: she stands, in a large hat and a long robe, against a wall of dense, high-keyed colour — bands of green, rose, red and blue, peopled with small Asian figures and motifs. The only person Klimt painted twice, and the record of his turn from gold to colour.
Adele Bloch-Bauer is the unique double sitter, and the two portraits are the clearest demonstration of the change in Klimt's art. The 1907 portrait sets her in a field of gold, the summit of the golden style, her body dissolved into ornament; the 1912 portrait sets her against a wall of hot colour and East Asian motif, standing, clothed, her face and hands modelled as before but the ground now pigment rather than metal. The gold has been replaced by colour; the flat decorative field remains, but it is now a field of Chinese and Japanese figures, flowers and bands, drawn from the folk and Asian art Klimt collected. The two portraits, five years apart, are the golden phase and the late style in a single sitter.
The late portraits — the second Adele, Mäda Primavesi, Friederike Maria Beer, the Lady with a Fan — replace the gold ground with dense, bright, mosaic-like colour, the influence of the Fauves and of the East Asian and folk art Klimt collected. The figure stands against a wall of pattern — here the small Asian horsemen and figures of Klimt's own collection of Chinese and Korean objects — in a hot, high-keyed colour that is the golden style translated out of metal into pigment. The second Adele is one of the finest of these, and the direct comparison with the gold portrait of the same sitter makes it the key work for understanding the transition.
Like the gold portrait, the second Adele was looted from the Bloch-Bauer collection by the Nazis, held for sixty years by the Austrian state gallery, and restituted to Maria Altmann in 2006 in the landmark case. Where the gold portrait went to the Neue Galerie, the second was sold at auction; it was bought by Oprah Winfrey, who later sold it, and it passed, in 2023, again through the market. Its history is the history of the whole Bloch-Bauer collection — patronage, looting, exile, litigation, restitution, sale — and it is, with its golden sister, a monument of that history.
The modelled face and hands, unchanged from the golden manner; the large hat; the long robe; the wall of hot colour behind — green, rose, red, blue — peopled with small Asian figures and motifs. Then set it beside the gold portrait of 1907, and see the whole turn of Klimt's late art in one sitter.
Adele Bloch-Bauer II is the record of Klimt's turn from gold to colour, painted five years after the famous gold portrait of the same, unique, twice-painted sitter. It is one of the finest of the late portraits, the golden style translated into a field of hot colour and Asian motif, and, with its golden sister, a monument of the Bloch-Bauer history of patronage, looting and restitution.
The second Adele is the pivot of Klimt's late development, and the reason is precisely that it can be set beside the first: the same sitter, the same painter, five years apart, in two utterly different manners. The 1907 portrait is the golden style at its densest — the body dissolved into a field of gold and silver ornament, the sitter an icon. The 1912 portrait keeps the method — the modelled face and hands, the flat decorative field behind — but replaces the gold with hot pigment and the abstract ornament with the figurative motifs of East Asian art: small horsemen, flowers, birds, drawn from the Chinese and Korean objects Klimt collected and hung in his studio. The gold has become colour; the abstract has become figurative; the icon has become a woman standing before a painted wall. No other pair in the œuvre shows the transition so exactly.
The second Adele inaugurates the great sequence of late portraits — Mäda Primavesi (1912), Friederike Maria Beer (1916), the Lady with a Fan (1917–18), the unfinished Amalie Zuckerkandl — in which Klimt set his sitters against dense walls of high-keyed colour and Asian and folk motif, the golden manner translated into pigment. To many these late pictures are the equal of the gold, richer in colour and freer in handling; the second Adele, the first and one of the finest of them, is the key to the whole late achievement, and its direct relation to the famous gold portrait makes it the single most instructive picture for understanding where Klimt's art was going when it ended.
That Adele Bloch-Bauer is the only sitter Klimt painted twice has always been taken as a mark of her particular importance to him — the ground of the persistent tradition that she was his lover, unprovable but widely believed. Whether or not the affair was real, the two portraits make her the most fully recorded of all his sitters, the one face that carries his art across the divide of its greatest change, from gold to colour; and her early death in 1925, before the catastrophe, and the long afterlife of her portraits in looting, litigation and restitution, have made her, more than any other, the human face of Klimt's world and its fate.
Adele Bloch-Bauer II is the pivot of Klimt's late art and the record of a unique double sitting — the only person he painted twice, in gold in 1907 and in colour in 1912. It is one of the finest of the late portraits and the key to the transition from the golden style to the hot colour of the final years, and, with its golden sister, a monument of the Bloch-Bauer history of patronage, looting and restitution that runs through the whole modern reception of Klimt.
Documented work · 4 language editions Q5995008 Wikipedia (es)
A near-square landscape almost entirely filled by a single apple tree in leaf and fruit, its rounded canopy a dense, shimmering, all-over field of green flecked with red apples and coloured blossom, the sky reduced to the barest strip. One of the fruit-tree landscapes, close in spirit to the Pear Tree. — private collection.
Apple Tree I is the fruit tree as a flat, shimmering field of colour: the rounded canopy fills almost the whole square, a mosaic of dabbed green flecked with the red of the apples and the colours of surrounding flowers, the sky and depth all but eliminated. It belongs with the Pear Tree, the Apple Tree II and the other fruit-tree pictures to the group in which Klimt turned a single tree into a decorative field, at once a faithful image of a laden tree in summer and a near-abstract pattern of green and red. The tree's round mass gives the picture a centred, almost heraldic composition.
The fruit-tree landscapes are among the most admired of Klimt's Attersee pictures, and they show the landscape method — the close crop, the excluded sky, the all-over dabbed surface — applied to the single tree, the vegetal equivalent of the golden ground. Apple Tree I is one of the finest, its round canopy of green and red one of the warmest of the tree pictures. It has passed through the market and the restitution history that attends so many of the pictures of Klimt's collectors.
The single apple tree filling the square; the rounded canopy of dabbed green flecked with red apples; the barest strip of sky; the near-abstraction. Then the round mass of the tree, centred and almost heraldic.
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.
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.
Apple Tree I is one of Klimt's fruit-tree landscapes — a single laden apple tree turned into a shimmering, all-over field of green and red, the sky all but gone. With the Pear Tree it is among the finest of the tree pictures, the landscape method applied to the single tree, the round canopy warm and heraldic.
Documented work · 2 language editions Q19912810
A near-square landscape of an avenue of trees in the park of Schloss Kammer — the tall trunks rising in a receding row, the foliage a dense canopy, the path leading into the shimmering mass, the sky excluded. One of the finest of the Schloss Kammer landscapes. — Belvedere, Vienna.
The Avenue is one of the most structured of Klimt's landscapes: the receding row of tall tree-trunks gives it a perspective and a rhythm the more radically flat pictures lack, drawing the eye down the path into the dense shimmering canopy — though the sky is still excluded and the foliage dissolved into an all-over field of dabbed colour. The tension between the receding avenue and the flat patterned surface is the picture's interest, the one landscape motif that gave Klimt a strong recession to set against his habitual flatness. It is among the most admired of the Kammer pictures.
The Schloss Kammer landscapes — the castle from the water, the park, this avenue — form a distinct group in which Klimt turned his method on the ordered planting of a castle park, and the Avenue is the one in which the ordered recession of the trees most asserts itself against the flattening. The Belvedere holds it among the great collection of Klimt, one of the loveliest of the Attersee landscapes and one of the most structurally interesting.
The receding row of tall trunks; the dense canopy of foliage; the path leading into the shimmering mass; the excluded sky. Then the tension — the receding avenue against the flat patterned surface.
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.
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.
Avenue in the Park of Schloss Kammer is one of the finest and most structured of Klimt's landscapes — an avenue of trees receding into a dense shimmering canopy, the one motif that gave him a strong recession to set against his habitual flatness. In the Belvedere, it is among the loveliest of the Kammer pictures.
Documented work · 4 language editions Q19912225 Wikipedia (fr)
Oil on canvas, 150 × 110 cm. A full-length of Mäda Primavesi, aged about nine, daughter of the banker and Werkstätte backer Otto Primavesi; she stands, feet planted, chin up, self-possessed and challenging, in a white dress with pink and floral accents, on a floor scattered with blossom and against a wall of pattern. One of the finest of Klimt's child portraits. — Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Mäda Primavesi is a rare and wonderful thing — a child portrait in the full late colour manner, and a portrait of remarkable psychological presence. The nine-year-old stands planted and frontal, her chin lifted, her gaze direct and unabashed, entirely self-possessed — a child painted not as a decorative doll but as a person with a will, one of the most vivid children in modern portraiture. The white dress with its pink sash, the floor scattered with stylised blossom, the wall of pattern behind are the late colour manner, but the picture's power is the girl's character, caught with an acuteness that recalls the child portraits of Velázquez and Reynolds.
Mäda Primavesi lived to the year 2000, and late in life recalled sitting for Klimt and insisting, against the painter and her mother, on the pose she wanted — which may account for the picture's air of a child asserting herself. The Primavesis were among Klimt's late patrons and backers of the Wiener Werkstätte; the Met holds both this portrait of the daughter and, in the family's history, the memory of that patronage. It is one of the finest and most beloved of the late pictures.
The nine-year-old planted frontal, chin up, gaze direct and unabashed; the white dress with its pink sash; the floor scattered with blossom; the wall of pattern. Then the character — a child with a will, one of the most vivid in modern portraiture.
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 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.
Mäda Primavesi is one of the finest of Klimt's child portraits — a nine-year-old girl, planted and self-possessed, her gaze direct and unabashed, in the full late colour manner. In the Met, it is among the most beloved of the late pictures, a portrait not of a decorative doll but of a person with a will, caught with an acuteness worthy of Velázquez.
Documented work · 2 language editions Q130214318
Oil on canvas, 50 × 50.5 cm. A portrait of Ria Munk, a young Viennese woman who killed herself in 1911, shown on her deathbed among flowers — a memorial commissioned by her grieving family. The first of Klimt's several attempts at the Munk portraits, and one of the most poignant pictures in the œuvre. — private collection.
Maria ('Ria') Munk, a young woman of a wealthy Viennese family, shot herself in 1911 after a broken engagement, and her mother commissioned Klimt to paint a memorial. This first version shows her on her deathbed, her head among a bank of flowers, at peace — a picture of extraordinary tenderness and sadness, the dead girl made to seem asleep among blossoms. The family found the deathbed image too painful, and Klimt made further attempts (The Dancer / Ria Munk II, and Ria Munk III) that moved away from the deathbed toward an idealised living portrait. The three Munk pictures are among the saddest and most personal of the late works.
The Munk commissions are a unique sequence in Klimt's œuvre — three attempts to portray a dead girl, moving from the literal deathbed to the idealised celebration of youth — and they show the painter grappling, at a family's request, with death made particular and personal, rather than the great impersonal allegories of Death and Life. This first, deathbed version is the most direct and the most moving, the young suicide asleep among her flowers.
The young woman on her deathbed; the bank of flowers around her head; the air of peaceful sleep; the small, intimate scale. Then the story — the suicide, the grieving mother, the family's pain at the image.
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 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.
Ria Munk on her Deathbed is one of the most poignant pictures in Klimt's œuvre — a memorial to a young suicide, shown asleep among flowers, the first of three attempts at the Munk portrait. Tender and sad, it is Klimt grappling with death made personal, at a grieving family's request, rather than the great impersonal allegories.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q113939857
A near-square landscape of the lakeside village of Cassone on Lake Garda — the houses and the church tower rising among dark cypresses, the whole reflected in the water below, in a dense, shimmering, all-over field of colour. One of the landscapes of Klimt's 1913 summer on Lake Garda. — private collection.
In 1913 Klimt spent the summer not at the Attersee but on Lake Garda in northern Italy, and the landscapes of that summer — the Church in Cassone, Malcesine on Lake Garda — turn his method on the Italian lakeside villages: the clustered houses, the church tower, the dark cypresses, reflected in the water, dissolved into a dense mosaic of colour, the sky reduced to a strip. The village of Cassone, its buildings rising among the cypresses and doubled in the reflection, becomes a shimmering all-over field, the architecture giving the picture its one note of regularity amid the dissolving foliage and water.
The Garda landscapes are a distinct group among Klimt's late landscapes — the Italian village rather than the Austrian lake and wood — and they show the flattening method applied to a denser, more architectural motif, the clustered houses and towers of a hill-village by the water. They are among the most colourful and most structured of the landscapes, the village a mosaic of coloured facades and dark cypresses. The Church in Cassone is one of the finest.
The houses and church tower of Cassone rising among dark cypresses; the reflection in the water below; the dense mosaic of coloured facades; the strip of sky. Then the Italian village turned into a shimmering all-over field.
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.
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.
Church in Cassone is one of Klimt's landscapes of the summer of 1913 on Lake Garda — the Italian lakeside village of clustered houses, church tower and dark cypresses, doubled in the water and dissolved into a dense mosaic of colour. It is among the most colourful and structured of the late landscapes, the flattening method turned on the hill-village by the lake.
Italian Garden Landscape (Gardone) (Kunsthaus Zug): a landscape of an Italian garden, of the Garda summer, dissolved into a dense field of foliage and flowers; one of the Italian landscapes of 1913.
Documented work · 4 language editions Q24860753 Wikipedia (fr)
Oil on canvas, 140 × 85 cm. A full-length of Eugenia ('Mäda's mother') Primavesi, wife of the banker Otto Primavesi, standing in a loose patterned gown against a dense wall of East Asian and folk ornament, in the hot colour of the late style. One of the late colour portraits, and a companion, in the family, to the great child portrait of her daughter. — Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Japan.
Eugenia Primavesi, an actress before her marriage to the banker and Werkstätte backer Otto Primavesi, stands in a loose, brightly patterned gown against a wall of dense ornament — flowers, figures, folk and Asian motif — in the full late colour manner. The picture is one of the great late portraits, the figure and the ground fused into a field of hot colour, the face and hands the modelled notes. With the portrait of her daughter Mäda, it records the Primavesi patronage, among the most important of Klimt's last years, and it is one of the works by which the late colour portrait is known in Japan, at the Toyota museum.
The Primavesis — Otto the banker and Werkstätte backer, Eugenia the former actress, Mäda the daughter — were among Klimt's principal late patrons, and the two Primavesi portraits are among the finest of the late colour pictures. Eugenia's, in Japan, sets the figure against one of the densest of the ornamental grounds, the late manner at its most exuberant; it is a companion, in the family and in the œuvre, to the celebrated child portrait of Mäda in the Met.
The loose, brightly patterned gown; the dense wall of East Asian and folk ornament; the hot colour; the modelled face and hands. Then the Primavesi patronage, and the companion portrait of the daughter Mäda.
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 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.
The Portrait of Eugenia Primavesi is one of the great late colour portraits — a former actress, wife of Klimt's late patron, set against a dense wall of hot ornament — and a record of the Primavesi patronage that sustained the painter's last years. In the Toyota museum in Japan, it is a companion to the celebrated child portrait of her daughter Mäda.
Major work · 16 language editions Q5967091 Wikipedia
Oil on canvas, 190 × 200 cm — National Gallery Prague (Trade Fair Palace). A large, near-square canvas: a swirling, tumbling mass of female figures — six or seven young women, sleeping, dreaming, entwined — wrapped together in a great oval of brilliantly patterned drapery, flowers and circles and ovals in hot pinks, purples, blues and greens, against a dark ground. At the centre, one figure, the 'maiden', sleeps with her arms raised over her head; the others surround and merge with her. One of the great colour-compositions of Klimt's late style.
The Maiden has been read as an allegory of the stages or states of young womanhood — the single figure of the maiden dreaming, and around her the other figures as her dreams, her possible selves, the phases of awakening sexuality — all wrapped in one swirling mass of colour and pattern. It is a picture of dream and metamorphosis, the female figures dissolving into one another and into the ornament, and it belongs with the Water Serpents and the erotic pictures as a celebration of the female body, here multiplied and merged into a single decorative organism. The subject is less a narrative than a mood: youth, sleep, dream, the latent erotic.
The picture is one of the fullest statements of the late manner's colour: the gold is entirely gone, replaced by a dense, hot, mosaic-like field of pattern in high-keyed pinks, purples, blues and greens, the figures and the ornament fused into one swirling mass. It is the golden style's flattening and patterning translated wholly into colour, and at a scale — nearly two metres square — that makes it monumental. The National Gallery in Prague holds it as one of the central works of its modern collection.
The central sleeping maiden, arms raised; the surrounding figures, entwined and merging; the great oval of patterned drapery that wraps them all; the hot pinks, purples, blues and greens; the flowers and circles of the ornament. Then the dissolution — the figures merging into one another and into the pattern — which is the picture's dreamlike subject.
The Maiden is one of the summits of Klimt's late colour style — a swirling mass of dreaming female figures wrapped in brilliant pattern, an allegory of youth and awakening sexuality. It is the golden style's flattening translated wholly into hot colour, and one of the great decorative compositions of the painter's final years.
The dissolution of the figures into one another and into the ornament is the picture's real subject. The central maiden sleeps, and the figures around her — some clothed, some nude, some only half-emerged from the swirling drapery — are less separate women than states of one, the phases of a dream or of an awakening; they merge at the edges, share the field of pattern, tumble together in a single organism of colour. It is Klimt's fullest image of metamorphosis and of the latent, dreaming erotic of youth, and it belongs with the Water Serpents and the Friends as a celebration of the female body multiplied and entwined, freed here from the femme fatale's danger into pure, dreaming sensuality.
At nearly two metres square, The Maiden is one of the most monumental of the late colour pictures, and one of the most exuberant: the field of hot pinks, purples, blues and greens, the flowers and circles and ovals, the tumbling figures, fill the great square with a density and a brilliance that the golden pictures, for all their splendour, did not have. It is the golden style's flattening and patterning carried wholly into colour and pushed to a new pitch of intensity, and the National Gallery in Prague holds it as one of the summits of Central European modernism. With The Bride (unfinished at his death) it is Klimt's fullest late statement on youth, sleep and the awakening body.
The Maiden belongs with The Bride (left unfinished at Klimt's death) as the two great late allegories of young womanhood and the awakening erotic — swirling masses of female figures merging into fields of hot pattern, dream-images of youth and sexuality. Where the golden phase had treated the woman as icon (Adele) or femme fatale (Judith), the late allegories treat her as dream and metamorphosis, multiple and merging, freed into pure colour and sensuality. The Maiden is the finished summit of this late mode, and one of the fullest realisations of the colour style that replaced the gold.
In the Trade Fair Palace in Prague, the great modernist building that houses the National Gallery's modern collection, The Maiden is among the central works, a burst of hot colour and swirling form; at nearly two metres square it envelops the viewer, and the eye, once in the swirl of merging figures and pattern, is slow to find its way out — which is the dreamlike effect the picture intends.
The Maiden is one of the summits of Klimt's late colour style — a great square filled with a swirling, dreaming mass of young women wrapped in brilliant pattern, an allegory of youth and the awakening erotic. The gold is gone, translated wholly into hot pink, purple, blue and green; the flattening and the ornament remain, at monumental scale. It is the freest and most exuberant of the late allegories, and one of the great decorative compositions of the age. It is the finished counterpart to the unfinished Bride, and together they are Klimt's last word on youth and the awakening body, translated wholly into the hot colour of his final years. With The Bride, it is the fullest of Klimt's late meditations on youth and the erotic, and one of the works that has most raised the standing of the colour pictures against the long dominance of the gold. It hangs in Prague as one of the treasures of Central European modernism, a burst of colour and dream at the heart of the National Gallery's modern rooms. The catalogue counts it among the ten works to which Klimt's Wikipedia-language reach gives major status, and it earns the rank: a monumental, finished, radiant statement of the late manner. Painted in 1912–13, at the height of the colour years, it is contemporary with the second Adele and shares that picture's turn from metal to pigment; the two together define the manner of Klimt's last decade.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q19912824
A near-square landscape of a house on the Attersee shore, seen across the water so that it rises from its reflection, the building and the surrounding trees dissolved into a shimmering, all-over field, the lake doubling the composition. One of the lakeside-house landscapes of the late Attersee summers. — Belvedere, Vienna.
The picture sets a country house on the lake shore across the water, rising from its own reflection, the whole — house, trees, water — brought flat against the plane and dissolved into a dense mosaic of coloured dabs, the reflection doubling the composition in the manner of the Water Castle. The house's facade and windows give the one note of regularity amid the shimmering foliage and water. It belongs to the group of lakeside architectural landscapes — the castle, the houses of Unterach and Litzlberg — that are among the most admired of the late Attersee pictures, and the Belvedere holds it among the great collection of Klimt.
The lakeside-house landscapes, seen across the water and doubled in reflection, are a characteristic late Attersee motif, and they show Klimt turning his flattening method on the vernacular building by the lake, pressing architecture and water alike into a shimmering flat field. The Belvedere's picture is a fine example, the country house rising from its reflection into the dissolving mass of trees and water.
The house rising from its reflection across the water; the trees and lake dissolved into shimmer; the facade and windows the one note of regularity; the doubled composition. Then the architecture pressed flat into the shimmering field.
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.
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.
Country House on the Attersee is one of Klimt's late lakeside landscapes — a house across the water, rising from its reflection, dissolved with its trees into a shimmering all-over field. In the Belvedere, it is among the admired late Attersee pictures, the flattening method turned on the vernacular building by the lake.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q121817342 Wikipedia (fr)
A near-square landscape of the garden and facade of a forester's house at Weissenbach on the Attersee — the wall of the house, its windows, and the flowers before it dissolved into a dense, shimmering, all-over field of colour, the sky excluded. One of the house-and-garden landscapes of Klimt's late Attersee summers. — Neue Galerie, New York.
The forester's-house pictures turn Klimt's method on a humble building and its garden — the flat facade with its regular windows, the bank of flowers before it — pressing the whole against the plane in a dense mosaic of coloured dabs, the architecture giving the picture its grid of windows amid the dissolving foliage. The tension between the regular facade and the shimmering flat surface is the picture's interest, akin to the Schloss Kammer pictures but on a humbler, more intimate motif. It belongs to the late Attersee landscapes, and it is one of the works by which the Neue Galerie holds Klimt.
The house-and-garden landscapes are a distinct group among the late Attersee pictures, in which Klimt applied his flattening to the vernacular building and its flowers rather than to the castle or the open field; they are among the most intimate and domestic of the landscapes. The Neue Galerie in New York holds this one, one of the major American concentrations of Klimt, and it is a fine example of the late landscape manner, the humble facade and its garden turned into shimmering pattern.
The flat facade with its regular windows; the bank of flowers before it; the dense mosaic of coloured dabs; the excluded sky. Then the tension between the regular grid of windows and the shimmering flat surface.
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.
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.
Forester's House in Weissenbach II is one of Klimt's late house-and-garden landscapes — a humble Attersee building and its flower-garden pressed flat into a dense shimmering mosaic, the grid of windows amid the dissolving foliage. In the Neue Galerie in New York, it is one of the most intimate and domestic of the landscapes.
Documented work · 2 language editions Q3256843 Wikipedia (fr)
A near-square landscape of the hamlet of Litzlberg on the Attersee — the houses and trees along the shore, seen across the water and doubled in reflection, dissolved into a dense, shimmering field of colour, the sky reduced to a strip. One of the lakeside-village landscapes of the late Attersee summers. — private collection.
Litzlberg on the Attersee sets the lakeside hamlet across the water, the houses and trees rising from their reflection, the whole pressed flat and dissolved into a mosaic of coloured dabs in the characteristic late manner. The cluster of buildings gives the picture its architectural notes amid the shimmering foliage and water; the reflection doubles the composition. It belongs with the Houses at Unterach and the other lakeside-village landscapes to the group of late Attersee pictures in which Klimt turned his flattening method on the settled shore of the lake he had painted for fifteen summers.
The Litzlberg pictures — Klimt stayed at Litzlberg in several of the Attersee summers — are among the late landscapes, and this one has a modern history typical of the pictures of Klimt's collectors: looted under the Nazis, it was restituted to the heirs of its owner (Amalie Redlich, murdered in the Holocaust) and sold, the proceeds partly funding a museum wing named for her. Its beauty and its history, as so often with Klimt, are now inseparable.
The lakeside hamlet across the water; the houses and trees rising from their reflection; the dense mosaic of colour; the strip of sky. Then the doubled composition, and the restitution history the serene surface carries.
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.
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.
Litzlberg on the Attersee is one of Klimt's late lakeside-village landscapes — the hamlet across the water, doubled in reflection, dissolved into a shimmering mosaic of colour. Looted and restituted like so many of the pictures of his collectors, it is one of the admired late Attersee pictures, its beauty and its history now inseparable.
Major work · 11 language editions Q136433749 Wikipedia
Oil on canvas — private collection (the Lederer family). A full-length of Elisabeth Lederer, daughter of August and Serena Lederer, Klimt's greatest patrons; she stands, in a long robe patterned with Chinese motifs, against a ground of Asian figures and ornament, in the hot colour of the late style. One of the finest of the late portraits, and the image of a daughter of the family that owned the largest private collection of Klimt.
August Lederer, the industrialist, and his wife Serena were Klimt's most important patrons: they owned the Beethoven Frieze, the University pictures (which they helped Klimt buy back and which were later burned in their collection at Immendorf), and many portraits and landscapes — the greatest holding of Klimt in private hands. Klimt painted Serena Lederer (1899) and their daughter Elisabeth (1914–16), and the family's patronage sustained him across his career. Elisabeth's portrait, in the late manner, sets her against a wall of Chinese figures and ornament from Klimt's own collection, in the hot colour that replaced the gold.
The Lederer collection was among the greatest casualties of the Nazi catastrophe. Seized after the Anschluss, much of it was stored at Schloss Immendorf and burned by retreating SS troops in 1945 — the University pictures and other major works lost forever. Elisabeth Lederer herself, half-Jewish, survived the war under precarious circumstances (there was a story, probably concocted for protection, that she was Klimt's illegitimate daughter). The portrait is a relic of the family whose patronage was central to Klimt and whose collection was destroyed and dispersed by the persecution.
The modelled face; the long robe of Chinese pattern; the wall of Asian figures and ornament behind; the hot colour of the late style. Then the history — the Lederers, the greatest of Klimt's patrons, and the destruction of their collection — that the portrait carries.
The Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer is one of the finest of Klimt's late portraits and the image of a daughter of his greatest patrons — the family whose collection, the largest of Klimt in private hands, was looted and largely burned in the catastrophe. It is a masterpiece of the late colour style and a memorial of a destroyed world of patronage.
Elisabeth Lederer's portrait is a characteristic late Klimt: the sitter stands full-length against a wall of dense pattern drawn from the East Asian art the painter collected — Chinese figures, dragons, flowers — in the hot, high-keyed colour that replaced the gold, her face and hands modelled with the old care, her long robe merging with the decorative field behind. It belongs with the second Adele, the Beer and the Lady with a Fan as one of the great late portraits, and it is among the most personal, for the Lederers were not merely patrons but the closest of Klimt's supporters, and Elisabeth was a child he had known.
No family's history so completely embodies the fate of Klimt's world as the Lederers'. The greatest collectors of his work, they owned the Beethoven Frieze, the three University pictures, and portraits and landscapes without number; and after the Anschluss the collection was seized, the family driven out or worse, and the University pictures and much else burned at Immendorf in 1945. Elisabeth survived; the collection did not. The portrait of the daughter, in the late colour manner, is thus doubly a memorial — of Klimt's finest patrons, and of the destruction that consumed both the pictures they owned and the world that had made their patronage possible. To look at it is to see the last flowering of a relationship, and a civilisation, that had only years left.
The portrait is a full-length, the grandest of the late portrait formats, and it shows the mature late manner complete: the sitter standing, her face and hands modelled with care, her long robe and the wall behind dissolved into a single field of East Asian figures, dragons and flowers in hot colour. It is the golden portrait's method — the island of flesh in the field of ornament — carried into pigment and the figurative motifs of Klimt's Asian collection, and it is among the finest examples of the type, the more poignant for the sitter's identity as a daughter of the patrons whose world was about to end.
The portrait, in the late full-length manner, sets the young woman against a wall of dense Asian ornament in hot colour, and its splendour is inseparable, now, from its poignancy: the daughter of Klimt's greatest patrons, painted in the last years of both the painter and the world that had sustained him. It is a masterpiece of the late style and an elegy at once.
The Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer is one of the finest of the late colour portraits and the image of a daughter of Klimt's greatest patrons, the family whose vast collection was looted and largely burned in the catastrophe. It is a masterpiece of the East-inflected late manner and a memorial of a world of patronage — the cultivated, wealthy, doomed Viennese-Jewish bourgeoisie — that Klimt served and that did not survive the generation after his death. The portrait remained with the Lederer family through the catastrophe and after, one of the survivors of a collection largely destroyed, and it is now among the most valued of the late portraits, both for its quality and for the history it carries. Among the late portraits of the women of Klimt's patron families, it stands with the second Adele and the Beer as a summit of the type, and it carries, more heavily than any, the shadow of what was coming to the world it records. The picture is a full-length in the grand late format, and among the last great portraits Klimt completed before his death in 1918. Klimt's portraits of the Lederer women — Serena in 1899 and Elisabeth here — span nearly his whole career, and this late one closes the relationship with his greatest patrons on a note of colour and grandeur, on the edge of the abyss.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q130165341 Wikipedia (it)
Oil on canvas. A portrait of Barbara Flöge, mother of Emilie Flöge, Klimt's companion — an older woman, painted with a grave restraint, in the late manner. A rare portrait of an older sitter, and a picture bound up with the Flöge family at the centre of Klimt's private life. — private collection.
Barbara Flöge was the mother of Emilie, Klimt's lifelong companion, and of Helene, who had married Klimt's brother Ernst — the Flöge family, into which Klimt was tied by his brother's marriage and his own long attachment to Emilie, was the closest he had to a family of his own. This portrait of the elderly Barbara is a rare image of an older sitter in the late œuvre, painted with a grave, restrained tenderness rather than the decorative splendour of the young society women. It is a private picture, a portrait of the matriarch of the family at the centre of Klimt's domestic life.
The Flöge connection was the constant of Klimt's private existence: his brother Ernst married Helene Flöge, and Klimt himself was Emilie's companion for twenty-seven years and the guardian, after Ernst's death, of his niece. The portrait of Barbara Flöge is a document of that family tie, and one of the few late portraits of an older woman — the decorative apparatus set aside for a grave, plain image of age, akin in spirit to the old woman of The Three Ages.
The elderly sitter; the grave, restrained treatment; the absence of the decorative splendour of the young society portraits. Then the Flöge connection — the matriarch of the family at the centre of Klimt's private life.
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 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.
The Portrait of Barbara Flöge is a rare late portrait of an older woman — the mother of Klimt's companion Emilie, painted with grave restraint — and a document of the Flöge family that was the constant of the painter's private life. The decorative splendour is set aside for a plain, tender image of age.
Documented work · 3 language editions Q104128492 Wikipedia
A near-square landscape of a single apple tree, its canopy a dense, shimmering field of green flecked with fruit and blossom, the tree set in a meadow with a band of distant hills, in the late colour manner. A companion to Apple Tree I among the fruit-tree landscapes. — Belvedere, Vienna (formerly; restitution history).
Apple Tree II sets the laden tree in a meadow, its rounded canopy a mosaic of dabbed green and red filling much of the square, with a band of meadow and distant hills giving a little more space than the flatter Apple Tree I. It belongs to the fruit-tree landscapes — the pears and apples turned into shimmering decorative fields — that are among the most admired of the Attersee pictures, and it is one of the warmest, the round mass of the fruiting tree heavy with green and red. The late manner's hotter colour distinguishes it from the earlier tree pictures.
Apple Tree II has one of the tangled restitution histories typical of Klimt's pictures: looted from a Jewish collection, restituted, and the subject of legal complexity in the decades since. Its history, like that of the Bloch-Bauer portraits and Water Serpents II, ties the serene landscape to the catastrophe that overtook Klimt's collectors. As a picture it is one of the finest of the fruit-tree group, the laden tree turned into a warm, shimmering field.
The laden apple tree in its meadow; the rounded canopy of dabbed green and red; the band of distant hills; the warm late colour. Then the restitution history the serene surface carries.
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.
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.
Apple Tree II is one of Klimt's fruit-tree landscapes — a laden apple tree in a meadow, its canopy a warm shimmering field of green and red — and, like so many of the pictures of his collectors, one bound up with the history of looting and restitution. It is among the finest of the tree pictures, the late manner's hot colour heavy on the fruiting tree.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q111821770
A near-square landscape of the village of Unterach on the Attersee — the church and the clustered houses along the shore, seen across the water and doubled in reflection, dissolved into a dense, shimmering mosaic of coloured facades. One of the Unterach landscapes of the late Attersee summers. — private collection.
The Church in Unterach sets the lakeside village across the water, the church tower and the clustered houses rising from their reflection, the whole pressed flat and dissolved into a mosaic of coloured facades and dark foliage in the late manner. The architecture — the church, the rows of houses — gives the picture its structure and its coloured geometry, set against the shimmering water and trees; the reflection doubles the composition. It belongs with the Houses at Unterach and the Litzlberg pictures to the late lakeside-village landscapes, among the most colourful and architectural of the œuvre.
The Unterach pictures — the church, the houses — are among Klimt's last landscapes, painted in the final Attersee summers before his death, and they show the flattening method at its most architectural, the village a mosaic of coloured buildings by the water. They are among the most immediately appealing of the late landscapes, the coloured facades and the doubling reflection making a rich, patterned surface.
The church and clustered houses across the water; the reflection doubling them; the mosaic of coloured facades and dark foliage; the coloured geometry of the architecture. Then the village dissolved into a shimmering patterned field.
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.
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.
Church in Unterach on the Attersee is one of Klimt's late lakeside-village landscapes — the church and houses across the water, doubled in reflection, dissolved into a mosaic of coloured facades. Among the most colourful and architectural of the landscapes, it is one of the last of the Attersee pictures, painted in the final summers before his death.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q136714049 Wikipedia (fr)
A near-square landscape of a wooded slope above Unterach on the Attersee — the trees and undergrowth of the hillside dissolved into a dense, shimmering, all-over field of green, the sky excluded. One of the late woodland landscapes of the final Attersee summers. — private collection.
The Forest Slope turns Klimt's method on a wooded hillside — the mass of trees and undergrowth rising up the slope, dissolved into a dense all-over field of dabbed green, the depth denied, the eye held on the shimmering surface. It belongs with the earlier fir and birch woods to the woodland landscapes, but in the hotter, denser colour of the late manner; the slope gives the picture a rising movement that the flatter woodland interiors lack. It is one of the late Attersee landscapes, painted in the last summers before Klimt's death.
The woodland landscapes run through Klimt's whole landscape career, from the fir and birch woods of the early 1900s to the forest slopes of the last years, and they are among the most atmospheric of the pictures — the forest as a dense, enveloping field, the eye given no way out. The Forest Slope in Unterach is a late example, in the richer colour of the final manner, one of the quiet radical landscapes of Klimt's last summers at the lake.
The wooded slope dissolved into a dense field of dabbed green; the rising movement of the hillside; the excluded sky and denied depth. Then the forest as an enveloping shimmering field, in the hot late colour.
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.
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.
Forest Slope in Unterach am Attersee is one of Klimt's late woodland landscapes — a wooded hillside dissolved into a dense, shimmering, all-over field of green, in the hot colour of the final manner. Painted in the last Attersee summers, it is one of the quiet, radical landscapes with which Klimt's landscape art closed.
Garden Landscape with Hilltop (Parish Garden) (Kunsthaus Zug): an Attersee garden landscape rising to a hilltop, dissolved into a dense shimmering field of foliage and blossom, in the late colour manner; one of the last landscapes.
Documented work · 3 language editions Q60629195
A near-square landscape of the houses of Unterach on the Attersee — the clustered lakeside buildings, seen across the water and doubled in reflection, dissolved into a dense mosaic of coloured facades, the sky reduced to a strip. One of the Unterach landscapes of the last Attersee summers. — private collection.
Houses at Unterach sets the lakeside village across the water, the rows of houses rising from their reflection, the whole pressed flat and dissolved into a mosaic of coloured facades and dark foliage in the late manner. The architecture — the geometry of the houses, the windows, the roofs — gives the picture its coloured structure, set against the shimmering water and trees; the reflection doubles the composition. It belongs with the Church in Unterach and the Litzlberg pictures to the late lakeside-village landscapes, among the most colourful and architectural of the œuvre, and among the last landscapes Klimt painted.
The lakeside-village landscapes of the last summers — Unterach, Litzlberg — are the culmination of Klimt's landscape art, the flattening method turned on the settled, coloured, architectural shore of the lake he had painted for fifteen years. They are among the most immediately appealing of the landscapes, the mosaic of coloured facades and the doubling reflection making a rich, patterned surface, and they are among the last works of a landscape art that ended with Klimt's death in 1918.
The clustered houses across the water; the reflection doubling them; the mosaic of coloured facades and dark foliage; the coloured geometry of the buildings. Then the village dissolved into a shimmering patterned field, among the last of the 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.
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.
Houses at Unterach on the Attersee is one of Klimt's last lakeside-village landscapes — the clustered houses across the water, doubled in reflection, dissolved into a mosaic of coloured facades. Among the most colourful and architectural of the landscapes, it is a culmination of the landscape art that ended with the painter's death in 1918.
Documented work · 2 language editions Q114349270
Oil on canvas. A portrait of a young woman in a fur muff and hat, against a dark ground, in the sparer, more intimate manner of the late portraits. A modern, restrained image, close to the fashion plate. — private collection.
The Lady with a Muff is one of the more intimate and modern of Klimt's late portraits — a young woman in a fur muff and hat, against a dark, undefined ground, without the dense walls of Asian ornament that fill the grand late portraits. The fur, the hat and the pale face carry the picture, in a restrained manner close to the fashion image; it belongs with the Black Feathered Hat and the Lady with Hat and Feather Boa to the group of sparer, more modern portraits of fashionable women that Klimt made alongside the ornamental grand portraits.
The existence, alongside the great colour-drenched portraits, of these sparer, darker, more intimate images shows the range of Klimt's late portraiture and, perhaps, the pressure of the younger Viennese painters, whose portraits were barer. The Lady with a Muff is a fashionable, momentary image, a glimpse of a woman in her winter furs, and one of the quieter of the late portraits.
The fur muff and hat; the pale face; the dark, undefined ground; the restrained, modern manner. Then the fashion image — a glimpse of a woman in her winter furs.
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 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.
Lady with a Muff is one of the sparer, more intimate of Klimt's late portraits — a young woman in fur muff and hat against a dark ground, close to the fashion image. It belongs with the other restrained late portraits that show the range of his final manner, alongside the great colour-drenched grand portraits.
Documented work · 2 language editions Q114031277
A near-square landscape of the Litzlbergkeller, an inn or beer-cellar on the Attersee shore, the building and its trees dissolved into a dense, shimmering field of colour, the sky reduced to a strip. One of the late Attersee landscapes, in the Leopold Museum. — Leopold Museum, Vienna.
The picture turns Klimt's flattening method on a lakeside inn — the Litzlbergkeller, near his summer quarters — the building and its surrounding trees pressed flat against the plane and dissolved into a mosaic of coloured dabs in the late manner. The facade gives the one note of regularity amid the shimmering foliage. It belongs to the late Attersee landscapes, and the Leopold Museum — built on Rudolf Leopold's great collection of Klimt and Schiele — holds it among the works by which it represents the painter's landscape art.
The Leopold Museum has one of the finest collections of Klimt, and its landscapes, including this one, are central to the modern re-estimate of that part of the œuvre. The Litzlbergkeller is a characteristic late Attersee picture — the vernacular building by the lake turned into a shimmering flat field — and one of the many quiet, radical landscapes of Klimt's last summers.
The lakeside inn and its trees dissolved into shimmer; the facade the one note of regularity; the strip of sky; the mosaic of coloured dabs. Then the late manner turned on a humble lakeside building.
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.
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.
Litzlbergkeller on the Attersee is one of Klimt's late Attersee landscapes — a lakeside inn and its trees dissolved into a shimmering flat field of colour. In the Leopold Museum, home of one of the great Klimt collections, it is a characteristic late landscape, the flattening method turned on the vernacular building by the lake.
Portrait of Friederike Maria Beer (Tel Aviv Museum of Art): a full-length of Friederike Maria Beer, a young woman of Klimt's late circle, standing in a fur-lined patterned coat against a wall swarming with Korean warriors from a vase in Klimt's collection — one of the great late colour portraits, and the only one whose sitter survived to old age and told its story.
Major work · 12 language editions Q28442857 Wikipedia
Oil on canvas, 68 × 55 cm — Galleria d'Arte Moderna Ricci Oddi, Piacenza. A bust-length of a young woman with dark hair and a fur-trimmed wrap, her face turned to the viewer, against a green ground, in the soft colour of the late style. A relatively intimate late portrait, and the subject of one of the most extraordinary theft-and-recovery stories in art history.
In 1996 a student discovered, from an old photograph, that this Portrait of a Lady was painted by Klimt over an earlier portrait — the Portrait of a Young Lady he had painted a few years before and apparently reworked, changing the sitter's appearance; an X-ray confirmed a different portrait beneath. The two are, in effect, one canvas bearing two of Klimt's late portraits, the second painted over the first — a rare and fascinating instance of the painter reusing and transforming his own work.
In February 1997 the picture was stolen from the Ricci Oddi gallery in Piacenza in a still-mysterious theft. It was missing for twenty-two years. In December 2019, during renovation work, a gardener clearing ivy from the gallery's exterior wall found a black bag hidden in a cavity in the wall; inside was the painting. It was authenticated as the original, and its recovery, after more than two decades, was an international sensation. The picture is now, improbably, both a fine late Klimt portrait and the protagonist of a genuine art-world mystery.
The young woman's face and dark hair; the fur-trimmed wrap; the soft green ground; the intimate scale, smaller than most of the late portraits. Then the two histories the picture carries — the portrait painted over an earlier one, revealed by X-ray, and the theft and twenty-two-year disappearance and strange recovery.
The Portrait of a Lady is a fine intimate portrait of Klimt's late years, and one of the most storied pictures in the œuvre: painted over an earlier portrait revealed only by X-ray, stolen in 1997 and found, hidden in a wall of the gallery it was taken from, twenty-two years later. Art history and detective story in one canvas.
The discovery, in 1996, that the Portrait of a Lady was painted over an earlier Klimt portrait — a Portrait of a Young Lady that the painter reworked, altering the face and hair — makes the picture unique in the œuvre: a single canvas bearing two of Klimt's late portraits, one beneath the other, revealed by X-ray. It is a rare glimpse of the painter's process of revision, and it has fed a small industry of speculation (the earlier sitter is said to have died, and Klimt to have transformed her portrait into another); whatever the truth, it is the one picture in which two Klimts occupy one canvas, and the fact deepens the strangeness of an already strange object.
The picture's fame now rests as much on its disappearance as on its painting. Stolen from the Ricci Oddi gallery in Piacenza in February 1997 — the theft never fully explained, the picture possibly removed before the reported date — it was missing for twenty-two years, one of the most sought art thefts in Italy. In December 2019 a gardener clearing ivy from the gallery's own outer wall found the painting, in a black bag, hidden in a metal-doored cavity in the wall itself — returned, or concealed, feet from where it had hung. Authenticated, it went back on display, and its recovery was worldwide news. The Portrait of a Lady is thus both a fine late Klimt and a genuine mystery, the picture with two faces and two disappearances.
Set beside the grand full-lengths of the late years, the Portrait of a Lady is small and intimate — a bust-length, softly painted, the young woman's face and dark hair against a quiet green ground, without the dense walls of Asian pattern that fill the Beer or the second Adele. It shows the gentler, more private side of Klimt's late portraiture, the sitter given a quiet tenderness rather than a decorative grandeur, and it is the more moving for its modesty — a real, particular young face, painted with care, that would become, through theft and recovery, one of the most famous small pictures in the world.
Back on the walls of the Ricci Oddi in Piacenza since its recovery, the Portrait of a Lady is now visited as much for its story as for its painting — but the painting rewards the visit: a quiet, tender, softly coloured late portrait, the more affecting for its modesty among the grander late works, and the more extraordinary for the two hidden histories, the portrait beneath and the theft, that it carries.
The Portrait of a Lady is a fine late portrait and the most storied object in the œuvre — a canvas bearing two Klimt portraits, one painted over the other and revealed by X-ray, and the subject of a twenty-two-year disappearance that ended when it was found hidden in the very wall of the gallery it was stolen from. Painting, revision and mystery in a single small picture, it is the improbable meeting-point of Klimt's art and the strangeness of its afterlife. Its recovery in 2019, after twenty-two years, restored to the Ricci Oddi gallery its greatest treasure, and gave the modest late portrait a fame far beyond its scale — the small picture at the centre of a genuine mystery. No other Klimt has had so strange an afterlife, and few small late portraits are now so widely known; the painting and its mystery have become, together, inseparable. It remains the Ricci Oddi's single most famous possession, and one of the most photographed small pictures in modern art. The picture is dated to about 1916–17, among the last of the intimate late portraits, and its quiet green ground and soft handling set it apart from the dense Asian-patterned walls of the grand late full-lengths; it is the gentlest of Klimt's final faces, and, by the accident of its theft and recovery, the most famous of them.
The Polecat Fur (Dame im Pelz) (private collection): a portrait of a woman in a fur wrap, of the late years, in the intimate manner close to the fashion image; one of the sparer late portraits.
Documented work · 3 language editions Q28002799 Wikipedia (de)
Oil on canvas, 173 × 60 cm. A tall, narrow picture of Adam and Eve: Eve, a blonde nude, stands smiling and forward, filling the panel; Adam, darker, stands behind her, his eyes closed, half-hidden. Left unfinished at Klimt's death in 1918. One of the last works and one of the few to treat a male nude. — Belvedere, Vienna.
Adam and Eve is one of Klimt's last pictures, unfinished at his death: Eve, a blonde, full-bodied nude, stands forward and smiling, radiant and dominant, filling the tall panel; Adam stands behind and above her, darker, his eyes closed, passive and half-effaced. The composition — the woman forward and alive, the man behind and subsumed — reverses the usual hierarchy and makes the picture, like so much of Klimt, a celebration of the woman, here as the source of life. It is one of the few pictures in which Klimt painted a male nude, and even here the man is subordinate to the radiant Eve.
The picture belongs to the late works and to Klimt's lifelong celebration of the female body and the woman as the vessel of life; Eve, forward and smiling, is the living, generative principle, Adam behind her almost an afterthought. Left unfinished, it is one of the pictures in the studio at Klimt's death, and the Belvedere holds it among the great collection, one of the last and one of the few to include a man.
Eve, the radiant blonde nude, forward and smiling, filling the panel; Adam behind, darker, eyes closed, half-effaced. Then the reversal — the woman forward and alive, the man subsumed — and the celebration of the woman as the source of life.
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 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.
Adam and Eve is one of Klimt's last pictures, unfinished at his death — the radiant Eve forward and smiling, Adam behind and subsumed, the usual hierarchy reversed. One of the few works to include a male nude, it is, like so much of Klimt, a celebration of the woman as the source of life. The Belvedere holds it among the last works.
Documented work · 4 language editions Q17635088 Wikipedia (es)
Oil on canvas, 110 × 110 cm. A square picture of an infant almost lost in a great pyramidal heap of brightly patterned blankets and coverlets — the baby's small face at the top of a mountain of colourful cloth. One of the last pictures Klimt completed, and one of his few images of infancy. — National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Baby (Cradle) is one of Klimt's most unusual and touching late pictures: the infant is almost engulfed by a great pyramid of blankets, quilts and coverlets, rendered as a dense, brilliant mosaic of pattern and colour that fills most of the square, with only the tiny face at the apex. The heap of patterned cloth is the picture's real subject — a mountain of ornament — and the baby a small vulnerable presence atop it; it is at once a tender image of infancy and a virtuoso field of the late colour and pattern. It was among the last things Klimt completed, and one of his few treatments of the very young.
The picture belongs to Klimt's lifelong meditation on the human cycle — infancy at one end, age and death at the other, the whole span mapped in the allegories from Hope to The Three Ages to Death and Life — and it treats the beginning of life with the same fusion of the tender and the decorative that runs through all of them, the vulnerable infant atop the mountain of patterned cloth. The National Gallery of Art in Washington holds it, one of the major late Klimts in America.
The tiny infant face at the apex; the great pyramidal heap of patterned blankets; the dense mosaic of colour filling the square. Then the heap of ornament as the real subject, the baby a small vulnerable presence atop it.
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 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.
Baby (Cradle) is one of the last and most touching of Klimt's pictures — an infant almost engulfed by a great pyramid of brightly patterned blankets, at once a tender image of infancy and a virtuoso field of late colour. In the National Gallery of Art in Washington, it treats the beginning of the human cycle with the fusion of the tender and the decorative that runs through all his allegories.
Head of a Woman (Lentos Art Museum, Linz): a late head of a woman, of the last years, in the free painterly manner of the unfinished late portraits.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q28002620
Oil on canvas, 70 × 70 cm. A small square portrait of a young woman in white, her face soft and rounded, painted with a loose, sketchy freedom, unfinished. One of the last portraits, and one of the freest in handling. — Belvedere, Vienna.
The Lady in White is a small, late, unfinished portrait of extraordinary freedom: the young woman's soft, rounded face is done, and around it the white dress and ground are laid in with a loose, sketchy, almost impressionistic touch, unusual in Klimt's usually finished surfaces. It shows the painter's late manner at its most relaxed and painterly, and, in its incompleteness, the freedom of the working process. It was among the pictures in the studio at Klimt's death in 1918, and it belongs to the group of late portraits — many unfinished — that close the œuvre.
The unfinished late portraits — the Lady in White, the Amalie Zuckerkandl, the Lady with a Fan's companions — are among the most revealing works in the œuvre, showing the late method and the free handling that the finished surfaces conceal. The Belvedere holds this one, one of the last and freest of Klimt's portraits, a soft young face emerging from loosely laid white.
The soft, rounded young face; the loose, sketchy white dress and ground; the unfinished, painterly freedom. Then the late manner at its most relaxed, and the working process laid bare.
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 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.
Lady in White is one of the last and freest of Klimt's portraits — a soft young face emerging from loosely, sketchily laid white, unfinished at his death. In the Belvedere, it shows the late manner at its most relaxed and painterly, and the freedom of the working process that the finished surfaces conceal.
Documented work · 5 language editions Q28007512 Wikipedia (de)
Oil on canvas, 128 × 128 cm. A square portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl, a young woman of a cultivated Viennese family, her face and shoulders done and the rest of the figure and ground left as bare canvas and charcoal drawing — one of the most striking of Klimt's unfinished pictures. She was later murdered in the Holocaust. — Belvedere, Vienna.
The Amalie Zuckerkandl is the most eloquent of Klimt's unfinished pictures: the sitter's soft, lovely face and her shoulders are painted, and the rest — the figure, the dress, the ground — is only laid in as charcoal drawing on the bare canvas, so that the picture shows, more clearly than any other, the late method: the face first, modelled and complete, and the decorative field to be built around it, here never begun. The bare canvas and the trailing charcoal give the picture a haunting incompleteness, the lovely face emerging from an unpainted void. It was among the works in the studio at Klimt's death in 1918.
The picture's incompleteness is doubled by its history: Amalie Zuckerkandl, of a family of Klimt's circle (her sister-in-law Berta Zuckerkandl was a famous salonnière and Klimt's supporter), was murdered in the Belzec death camp in 1942, and the portrait passed through the looting of Jewish property and a long restitution dispute. The unfinished face, emerging from the bare canvas, has become — like the gold Adele — an emblem of the fate of Klimt's sitters and their world: the lovely young woman, the picture never finished, the life destroyed.
The soft, lovely face and shoulders, painted and complete; the rest of the figure and ground as bare canvas and charcoal drawing; the haunting incompleteness. Then the method laid bare — the face first, the field never built — and the sitter's fate.
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 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.
The Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl is the most eloquent of Klimt's unfinished pictures — a lovely face emerging, complete, from a ground of bare canvas and charcoal, the decorative field never begun. In the Belvedere, it shows the late method laid bare; and, the sitter having been murdered at Belzec, it is, like the gold Adele, an emblem of the fate of Klimt's sitters and their destroyed world.
Documented work · 7 language editions Q124356656 Wikipedia
Oil on canvas, 140 × 80 cm. A full-length of a young woman of the Lieser family, standing in a loose robe against a red ground scattered with figures and flowers, in the hot late colour, left unfinished at Klimt's death. One of the last portraits, and a picture with a remarkable modern history. — private collection.
The Portrait of Fräulein Lieser — a daughter of the wealthy Jewish industrialist Lieser family — is one of the last portraits Klimt painted, left unfinished at his death in 1918: the young woman stands in a loose robe against a red ground scattered with figures and flowers, the face and figure done, the ground begun. It belongs to the late colour portraits, and it is a picture of the last months of the painter's life. Its modern history is extraordinary: lost from view for decades, its wartime provenance uncertain, it resurfaced in 2023–24 and was sold at auction in Vienna in 2024 for a very large sum, one of the most significant Klimt rediscoveries in living memory.
The picture's re-emergence, after decades in obscurity and with a provenance clouded by the Nazi era, was handled with an agreed settlement among possible heirs and the seller — a sign of the changed practice around Klimt's pictures, so many of which passed through the looting of Jewish collections. As a work it is one of the last of the late colour portraits, unfinished, the young woman set against the hot red ground; as an event, its rediscovery and sale in 2024 was among the most remarkable in the recent history of the art market.
The young woman in her loose robe; the red ground scattered with figures and flowers; the hot late colour; the unfinished passages. Then the history — the lost picture, the clouded provenance, the 2024 rediscovery and sale.
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 Portrait of Fräulein Lieser is one of the last portraits Klimt painted, left unfinished at his death — a young woman against a hot red ground of figures and flowers. Lost for decades and rediscovered in 2024, when it was sold in Vienna for a very large sum, it is among the most remarkable of recent Klimt rediscoveries, and its clouded provenance a sign of the histories that attend his pictures.
Documented work · 1 language edition Q28004609
Oil on canvas, 70 × 50 cm. A bust-length of Johanna Staude, a young woman, in a brightly patterned (Wiener Werkstätte) blouse of blue and orange, her face turned to the viewer, against a blue ground, left unfinished at Klimt's death. One of the last and most vivid of the late portraits. — Belvedere, Vienna.
The Johanna Staude is one of the last portraits, unfinished at Klimt's death in 1918: the young woman, in a blouse of vivid blue-and-orange Wiener Werkstätte pattern, turns her striking, strong-featured face to the viewer against a blue ground; the face and blouse are largely done, the ground and edges unfinished. It is one of the most vivid and modern of the late portraits — the bold patterned blouse, the direct strong face, the hot colour — and its incompleteness shows the late method. The blouse's fabric, a Werkstätte design, ties the picture to the total-artwork world of Klimt's late years.
The unfinished late portraits are among the most revealing in the œuvre, and the Johanna Staude is one of the finest — a strong, modern, vivid image, the patterned Werkstätte blouse and the direct face making a picture of unusual force. The Belvedere holds it among the last works, one of the pictures in the studio at Klimt's death, and a fitting near-close to the sequence of portraits of women that is the spine of his art.
The strong-featured face turned to the viewer; the vivid blue-and-orange Werkstätte blouse; the blue ground; the unfinished edges. Then the modernity and force — the bold pattern, the direct face — and the Werkstätte fabric tying the picture to Klimt's late world.
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 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.
The Portrait of Johanna Staude is one of the last and most vivid of Klimt's portraits — a strong-featured young woman in a bold blue-and-orange Werkstätte blouse, unfinished at his death. In the Belvedere, it is among the most modern and forceful of the late portraits, and a fitting near-close to the sequence of women that is the spine of the œuvre.
Documented work · 3 language editions Q104061291
Oil on canvas, 180 × 90 cm. The third and last of Klimt's attempts at a memorial portrait of Ria Munk, the young suicide of 1911 — an idealised full-length of the living girl in a loose robe against a dense wall of flowers and ornament, left unfinished at Klimt's death. One of the poignant late works. — private collection.
After the deathbed portrait and the reworked Dancer, the Munk family and Klimt attempted a third memorial — an idealised full-length of Ria as a living young woman, in a loose robe, against a dense field of flowers and ornament in the late colour manner. It was left unfinished at Klimt's death in 1918: the face and figure are done, the surrounding field of flowers begun and in places only drawn, so that the picture shows the late method laid bare — the modelled figure and the decorative ground being built around it. It is the last of the three Munk pictures, the memorial to a dead girl transformed, over three attempts, from a deathbed into a radiant living image.
The three Ria Munk portraits are a unique and poignant sequence — Klimt grappling, at a grieving family's repeated request, with death made particular — and the unfinished third is the most affecting, both for its subject and for its incompleteness, one of the pictures on the easel or in the studio at Klimt's death. Its unfinished state, the flowers trailing off into bare canvas, makes it, like the Lady with a Fan and the Amalie Zuckerkandl, a witness to the end of the œuvre.
The idealised full-length of the living girl; the loose robe; the dense field of flowers, begun and in places only drawn; the unfinished ground. Then the sequence — the third and last attempt at the memorial to a dead girl — and the incompleteness at Klimt's death.
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 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.
Portrait of Ria Munk III is the last of Klimt's three attempts at a memorial to a young suicide — an idealised full-length of the living girl in a field of flowers, left unfinished at his death in 1918. Poignant in its subject and its incompleteness, it shows the late method laid bare and stands among the last works of the œuvre.
The Bride (Die Braut) (Klimt Foundation / Belvedere): one of Klimt's last and greatest pictures, left unfinished at his death — a swirling mass of female figures, sleeping and dreaming, wrapped in brilliant pattern, one of them a bride; the lower part reveals, in the unfinished passages, a nude drawn beneath the intended drapery, a rare glimpse of the erotic foundation of the late allegories. With The Maiden, the fullest late statement on youth and the awakening body.
Major work · 16 language editions Q106522623 Wikipedia
Oil on canvas, 100 × 100 cm — private collection. A square canvas: a woman, bare-shouldered, holds a fan; her body is turned, her head inclined; and around and behind her rises a dense field of East Asian ornament — a phoenix, lotus flowers, birds and blossoms in hot pinks, greens, yellows and blues, drawn from the Chinese and Japanese art Klimt collected. One of the last pictures Klimt completed, found on his easel at his death in 1918, and among the fullest statements of the late colour style.
Woman with a Fan is the late style at its most exuberant: the gold entirely gone, the figure set against a wall of brilliant Asian pattern — the phoenix, the lotus, the birds and flowers of Klimt's collection of East Asian objects — in a hot, high-keyed colour that is the golden manner translated into pigment and pushed to a new intensity. The woman, bare-shouldered and self-possessed, is one of the freest of the late female figures; the picture has a warmth and an openness, a sensual ease, that the golden pictures' hieratic grandeur did not allow. It was among the works on Klimt's easel at his death, essentially complete, and it is one of the last things he made.
Woman with a Fan was sold at auction in London in June 2023 for £85.3 million, then the highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction in Europe — a measure of Klimt's standing at the very summit of the modern market and of the particular value of the late colour pictures. It had been in private hands and rarely seen; its sale returned it, briefly, to public attention as one of the most valuable pictures in the world.
The bare-shouldered woman and her fan; the inclined head; the phoenix, lotus and birds of the East Asian ornament; the hot pinks, greens and yellows; the sensual ease of the figure. Then remember that this was on his easel when he died, one of the last things Klimt made.
Woman with a Fan is one of Klimt's last completed pictures and one of the fullest statements of his late colour style — the figure set against a brilliant field of East Asian phoenix and lotus, the gold replaced by hot pigment, the mood sensual and free. Found on his easel at his death in 1918, and sold in 2023 for a European auction record, it is the late manner's exuberant farewell.
Woman with a Fan is the fullest and freest statement of Klimt's late immersion in East Asian art. The phoenix rising behind the woman, the lotus flowers, the birds and blossoms are drawn directly from the Chinese and Japanese art — robes, screens, prints — that Klimt collected in quantity and hung in his studio, and they are rendered in a hot, high-keyed colour, pinks and greens and yellows, that is the golden style's ornament translated into pigment and pushed to its most exuberant. The bare-shouldered woman, turned and inclined, is one of the most relaxed and sensual of the late figures, freed from both the gold's hieratic grandeur and the femme fatale's danger into a warm, open ease. It is the late manner at its happiest.
Found on Klimt's easel at his death in February 1918, essentially complete, Woman with a Fan is one of the last things he made, and it belongs with the unfinished Lady with a Fan's companions — the Bride, the Amalie Zuckerkandl — as the close of the œuvre. Its sale in London in June 2023 for £85.3 million, a European auction record, marked Klimt's position at the very top of the art market and the particular prestige of the late colour pictures, long overshadowed by the gold and now recognised as their equal. It is the exuberant farewell of a painter who died with the brush in reach, the East and the colour and the sensual ease of his final manner gathered into one square canvas.
The bare-shouldered woman of Woman with a Fan is one of the freest of Klimt's late female figures — sensual, self-possessed, at ease, neither the golden icon nor the dangerous femme fatale but simply a woman, warm and open, set among the phoenix and lotus of the painter's beloved East. The late manner, in this last completed picture, has arrived at a kind of serenity: the anxiety and the danger of the golden women have given way to warmth and colour, and the woman holds her fan and inclines her head with an unforced grace. It is the note Klimt's art had reached when it ended, and a gentle one to close on.
Long in private hands and rarely shown, Woman with a Fan has been seen by the public chiefly at the moments of its sales; it is the late colour manner at its most exuberant and most serene, and one of the very last things Klimt made. To see it is to see where his art had arrived when it stopped — warm, sensual, colour-drenched, at ease among the phoenix and the lotus — and to feel the loss of the pictures the stroke and the influenza of 1918 prevented.
Woman with a Fan is the exuberant farewell of Klimt's late colour style — the bare-shouldered woman set against a brilliant field of East Asian phoenix and lotus, the gold replaced by hot pigment, the mood sensual and free. One of the last things he completed, found on his easel at his death in 1918, and sold in 2023 for a European auction record, it is the final flowering of the manner his last decade invented, and the close of the catalogue's chronology. Its record sale in 2023 confirmed the late colour pictures' place at the very summit of Klimt's market, long after the gold had been canonical, and returned this last, serene, exuberant work to the world's attention as one of the most valuable paintings in existence.
Works retrieved from Wikidata (creator P170 = Q34661, with image P18); dates from P571 where present, otherwise supplied from the literature; locations from P195/P276; materials P186; dimensions P2048/P2049. Tier labels reflect how many Wikipedia language editions carry an article on the work. Images from Wikimedia Commons; click to enlarge, arrow keys to step. Fetched 2026-08-21.