GUSTAV KLIMT|12 MIN READ

What Gustav Klimt Artworks Mean

You know the gold. What you may not know is who Klimt's most loved pictures were made for, and what happened to them once they left his studio.

WRITER Moryarty

Lady with a Muff by Gustav Klimt, 1916 — Gustav Klimt, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

What Gustav Klimt's art means depends on which work you look at, and on what happened after that work was made. Klimt was a Viennese painter, born in 1862 and dead in 1918, and a cofounder of the Vienna Secession, the group that broke away from the city's conservative art establishment in 1897. Over his career he moved from murals in large public buildings to portraits for private patrons, and his subjects shifted with the commissions. The seven works this article follows span biblical subjects, a university commission, private portraits and architectural commissions.

A work's meaning begins with why it was made and for whom, continues with what the first viewers said and what later generations chose to see, and changes again with who owned it and what happened to it. These seven stories keep crossing the same ground: love, health, identity and artistic freedom, then the darker twentieth-century history of confiscation, wartime destruction and restitution.

Why did the painting with Klimt's Hygieia outrage Vienna's professors and burn in 1945?

Klimt's goddess of health isn't a separate canvas. She is the figure at the bottom of Medicine, one of three faculty paintings Klimt was commissioned to make for the ceiling of the Great Hall at the University of Vienna. The Ministry of Culture and Education had asked him for Philosophy, Jurisprudence and Medicine to decorate the hall of Heinrich von Ferstel's new building on the Ringstrasse, which had opened in 1884. Where public decoration usually celebrated achievement, Klimt chose to show human life as a fate marked by illness and death.

Hygieia appears as a figure who holds life and death together, a radical departure from how the goddess of health was usually painted. Medicine went on view first at the tenth Secession exhibition in 1901. The reaction was angrier than anything Philosophy had drawn: a medical journal attacked the painting, and a group of university faculty lodged a formal complaint against it.

Berta Zuckerkandl recalled in her memoirs that the rector read out a petition calling acceptance of the ceiling paintings an insult to art, and that one dean said Klimt had dared to touch what Raphael had designed for eternity. The anatomist Emil Zuckerkandl stood on the other side, one of the few professors who signed in favour of keeping the paintings. The row ended in 1905, when Klimt cancelled his contract with the ministry and bought the three works back. After that he accepted no more public commissions and turned to private clients.

After the buy-back, the three paintings passed to private collectors. They changed hands several times and were seized by the Nazis from their Jewish owners in 1938. The three canvases were taken to a war art depot at Immendorf Castle in Lower Austria, and on 8 May 1945 a fire destroyed them there. It's believed that retreating SS forces set the castle alight, though that has never been conclusively verified. No museum holds the original Medicine today.

What survives is a thin but precious record. The only colour reproduction of the Hygieia detail made before the fire is plate 10 in Max Eisler's book Klimt: Eine Nachlese, published in Vienna in 1931. Important preparatory studies for Medicine are held by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Albertina and the Wien Museum. Together with photographs, they let the work be studied even though the painting itself is gone.

A new chapter opened on 13 November 2024, when a colour reconstruction of Medicine, about 12 by 8 metres and made with artificial intelligence, was unveiled on the facade of a Medical University of Vienna research building at the AKH Wien campus. Google Arts & Culture made the reconstruction together with the Belvedere in Vienna. The 2024 reconstruction lets visitors and staff see the whole of Medicine in colour again, on a university building, with Hygieia at its base. Before that, the complete composition was known only in black and white.

Judith and the shift from biblical heroism to sexual power

Klimt's gold-leaf Judith turns the biblical story of a city saved by a beheading into something closer to a battle between the sexes. The Belvedere in Vienna, which owns the painting, reads her today as a dangerous, seductive icon of femininity. The gallery points out that the picture leaves no room for the male aggressor. Judith holds the head almost tenderly, as if she is pushing it out of the picture.

The painting is oil and gold leaf on canvas, signed at the lower left, and its frame carries the title JUDITH UND HOLOFERNES along the top. A Vienna Secession catalogue from 1901 lists the work in Room III as number 20, Judith und Holofernes, with the note Privatbesitz, private ownership. Judith I is the name given to distinguish it from a second Judith picture Klimt painted in 1909.

The documented owners begin in Vienna. In 1901 the picture belonged to Anton Loew. By 1907 it had passed to Sophie Loew-Unger, also in Vienna, and by 1920 it was with Berthe Hodler, the widow of the painter Ferdinand Hodler, in Geneva. In 1954 the Belvedere bought the painting from her and brought it back to Vienna.

Some writers have read Adele Bloch-Bauer's features in Judith's face, noticing that the neck-band Judith wears resembles the one in Klimt's later portrait of Adele, but no document settles the identification. The painting hangs today in the Upper Belvedere.

How the Beethoven Frieze survived its temporary exhibition

The Beethoven Frieze was made for the fourteenth exhibition of the Vienna Secession, a tribute to the composer that ran from 15 April to 27 June 1902. Twenty-one artists worked on the show under the direction of Josef Hoffmann, with the aim of uniting architecture, painting, sculpture and music. Max Klinger's statue of Beethoven stood in the main hall, and Klimt's frieze ran along the left-hand aisle that visitors entered first, with an opening in the wall giving a view of the statue. Klimt was president of the Secession at the time.

The frieze follows the account of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony that Richard Wagner published in 1846. Its sequence ends with a choir of angels and a pair of lovers embracing, which stand for Schiller's Ode to Joy and for a happiness reached through love.

One critic wrote that the frieze might suit a cavern for heathen orgies, but not exhibition rooms where respectable women and girls were invited. The public disagreed. The show drew nearly 60,000 visitors and became one of the Secession's greatest public successes. At the preview, Gustav Mahler placed six trombonists on the stairs to play his own arrangement of an excerpt from Beethoven's setting of the Ode to Joy.

The frieze was meant to be temporary, and the other artists' murals in the exhibition were demolished after it closed. The Secession had already scheduled a major Klimt retrospective for the following year. Carl Reininghaus, Klimt's patron, bought the frieze and had it removed from the wall, which is why it survives at all. He found no suitable place to display the frieze, and when August Lederer bought it in 1915, he couldn't display it either.

The frieze was expropriated under the Nazis. After the Second World War it was returned to Erich Lederer in Geneva. He was denied an export permit. After 1961 the frieze was stored in the Lower Belvedere. In 1973 Lederer sold it to the Republic of Austria for about US$750,000, though some sources give 1972.

The Federal Office for the Protection of Monuments worked on the frieze under Manfred Koller, finishing in 1984, and a full-size copy made during the restoration appeared at that year's Venice Biennale. In 1985 the restored frieze was shown at the Künstlerhaus in a reconstruction of Hoffmann's side gallery. Since 1986 it has been on public view in its own room in the Secession basement. The Lederer heirs sought restitution in 2013, and a state commission rejected their petition in 2015.

Who was Adele Bloch-Bauer and how was her portrait won back?

In the summer of 1903 the banker Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer asked Klimt to paint his wife Adele, intending the portrait, by one account, as a present for her parents' anniversary in October. Klimt worked for years, and the finished Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, oil, gold and silver on canvas and signed and dated 1907 at the lower right, is among his most commanding pictures. Adele sits upright in a field of gold, her hands delicately clasped, and the Jewish Women's Archive describes the result as a modern icon of a grande dame.

The painting wasn't shown in public until early 1907, first in Mannheim in the year it was finished, and then at the Kunstschau in Vienna in 1908. In 1938 the Nazis seized it from the Bloch-Bauer home together with four other Klimt paintings. In 1941 the Nazi-appointed lawyer handling Ferdinand's assets gave the portrait to the Galerie Belvedere in Vienna, saying he was following wishes Adele had made in her will.

For decades the painting hung in Vienna under the name Woman in Gold, a title that hid the sitter's identity. The new title completed what the confiscation began by taking Adele Bloch-Bauer's name off the label, so the portrait made to honour her no longer carried it. In 1998 the journalist Hubertus Czernin established that the Belvedere held several works stolen from Jewish owners and had refused to return them. The portrait was among them.

Ferdinand's niece Maria Altmann hired the lawyer E. Randol Schoenberg to claim five Klimt works from the Belvedere. The claim ran seven years and included a hearing before the US Supreme Court. Schoenberg agreed to arbitration in Austria, a step he took partly because Altmann was 85. Her first reaction was to call him crazy. In 2005 an Austrian arbitration panel decided that the paintings should be returned to the heirs.

In 2006 Altmann sold the portrait to Ronald Lauder for US$135 million, at the time a record price for a painting. Lauder bought it for the Neue Galerie New York, where it has been on permanent view since 2006, in keeping with the family's wishes. Schoenberg said Altmann sold it partly to tell the truth of what had happened to her family, and partly because the heirs, who owned it jointly, couldn't afford to insure it in a private home. Adele Bloch-Bauer's name, which the old title removed, is now part of how the painting is known.

The Kiss was acquired before it was finished

The Kunstschau Wien of 1908, organised by Klimt, Josef Hoffmann and their colleagues in record time, opened to visitors on 1 June. Klimt hadn't been able to finish his famous embrace in time for the opening. It was shown under its original title, Liebespaar. The painting was the highlight of the Klimt room and the main attraction of the whole show, and the Austrian Ministry of Education bought it for the Modern Gallery while the exhibition was still running.

The gallery had opened only five years earlier and is now called the Belvedere. The painting was still unfinished when it was bought, for 25,000 crowns. It was finished and handed over to the ministry in 1909, against payment of the agreed price. The Belvedere considers it probable that Klimt made further changes after the Kunstschau, up to 1909, and an early photograph records the painting's first state.

In the autumn of 1909 a Modern Gallery catalogue cited the work for the first time as The Kiss, the title by which it's world famous today.

The materials explain much of its power. The lovers' garments are decorated with gold leaf, and the background is suffused with flakes of gold, silver and even platinum. The painting dates from the height of Klimt's Golden Period, when he developed a technique that combined gold leaf with oils and bronze paint. Klimt drew on Byzantine mosaics and icon painting for his use of gold. The gold-ground icon style is normally reserved for sacred subjects. He applied it here to secular love, and the work is often called a monumental icon.

Many people assume the couple are Klimt and his companion Emilie Flöge, perhaps on the Attersee where they spent their summers. The Belvedere notes that no biographical source says Klimt meant to portray himself and her, so the identification remains a romantic guess. What is certain is where the painting has been. It has stayed in the Belvedere's collection since its purchase, and it hangs in the Upper Belvedere in Vienna as the highlight of the permanent collection.

Fulfillment and the creation of the Stoclet dining room

Adolphe Stoclet, a Belgian financier, and his wife Suzanne commissioned Josef Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte to design, decorate and furnish their Brussels mansion with formal gardens, a project that ran from 1905 to 1911. Klimt was brought in to design the mosaic frieze for the dining hall. His drawing of the embracing lovers is one of nine cartoons, full-size working drawings, that he made for that frieze, mostly between 1908 and 1911.

Fulfillment, also called Lovers, is the concluding scene of the frieze and the counterpart to Expectation on the opposite side. The theme of Expectation and Fulfillment had been in Klimt's drawings since 1904 or 1905, years before the commission was finished. The two scenes face each other across the dining room.

The drawing was made in Vienna and at Kammerl am Attersee, in chalk, pencil and gouache with bronze, silver, gold and platinum. The frieze was executed as mosaic by Leopold Forstner's Wiener Mosaik-Werkstätte, and the working drawings specify enamel, gold inlay and coloured glass.

The MAK, the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, which holds the original drawing, records that one can assume the embracing lovers are Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge. That remains an interpretive suggestion rather than an established biographical portrait. The closing embrace echoes the lovers at the end of the Beethoven Frieze, and the drawing is closely related to The Kiss in style.

The Stoclet mansion is still privately owned by the Stoclet family and isn't open to the public, so the cartoons in Vienna are where the design can be seen. In 2012, for the 150th anniversary of Klimt's birth, the MAK showed the nine surviving cartoons again after several years of restoration, in an exhibition called Expectation and Fulfillment that ran from 21 March to 15 July.

Who was Mäda Primavesi and how did her portrait reach New York?

Otto Primavesi, a banker and industrialist from one of the wealthiest families in Moravia, and his wife Eugenia were patrons of progressive Viennese art. Between 1912 and 1914 they commissioned Klimt to paint their daughter and her mother. Mäda was nine when work on Klimt's portrait of her began.

According to Mäda's own account, she and her mother travelled regularly to Vienna for the sittings. Klimt made numerous sketches, trying out poses, costumes and background motifs before settling on the final version. In the summer of 1913 he wrote the family a receipt for a down payment of 15,000 crowns on the two portraits, of Mäda and of her mother.

In the finished work Mäda wears a white dress with delicate ornament, made at Klimt's suggestion by his companion, the designer Emilie Flöge. The family also supported the Wiener Werkstätte: Otto Primavesi helped keep the workshop going financially after its first backer, Fritz Waerndorfer, left. The Primavesis grew close to Klimt in the 1910s, and at their country house in Winkelsdorf, designed by Josef Hoffmann, they invited him to Christmas and New Year parties.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that Mäda's pose and expression show remarkable confidence for a nine-year-old, and that confidence matches her own later description of herself as willful and a tomboy. The willfulness she remembered in herself suggests the confidence in the portrait was hers, not just a mark of the family's wealth.

Otto Primavesi owned it from 1913 until his death in 1926, and his widow Eugenia held it after him. The family had to sell several paintings from their Klimt collection, probably because the Wiener Werkstätte was unprofitable and their own banking house failed. In 1928 the portrait passed through Hugo Bernatzik to the Neue Galerie in Vienna, which sold it to Jenny Pulitzer Steiner.

The Nazis seized the portrait from Jenny Pulitzer Steiner in Vienna in 1938, and it was restituted to her in 1951. In 1964 it entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as a gift of André and Clara Mertens, in memory of Clara's mother, its former owner. The original hangs in Gallery 800 at the Met.

Look back at the seven works and choose the story you'd like to live with on your wall, not just the gold you recognised first.

Did you know?

Klimt began his career with his brother Ernst and their friend Franz Matsch in a team called the Company of Artists, painting murals in large public buildings.
The Beethoven Frieze is regarded as Klimt's first work of his Golden Period, and it combines paint and gold with gilt stucco, mother-of-pearl buttons, mirror fragments and semi-precious stones, laid on mortar over reed matting.
In 1902 visitors could recognise Gustav Mahler in the frieze's knight in golden armour, according to art historian Alessandra Comini.
Klimt's Philosophy, one of the three university paintings, won a gold medal at the Paris World Exhibition, yet it was attacked by many critics in Austria.
Klimt made hundreds of sketches and drafts for his three University of Vienna paintings in the 1890s.
Eduard Pernkopf, the Nazi rector and anatomist, supported returning the faculty paintings to the university before they were sent to Immendorf Castle.
A Vienna newspaper review of 9 January 1916 described a portrait of a girl of about ten in a white dress, and the Klimt database identifies it as the Mäda Primavesi portrait.

Gustav Klimt questions, answered

Why was Klimt's Medicine painting destroyed? The painting, with Hygieia at its base, was seized from its Jewish owners in 1938 along with the other two university works. During the war the three paintings were hung in a Vienna exhibition and then put into storage. They were later moved to Immendorf Castle in Lower Austria, where a fire destroyed them on 8 May 1945.

What mythological scenes did Klimt paint? Judith and the Head of Holofernes and the figure of Hygieia come from biblical and classical sources. Klimt also turned to Greek myth for works like his Danae, a reclining figure wrapped in swirling drapery, and you can hang a print of that painting on your own wall.

What are Klimt's most sensual or erotic works? The Kiss and Fulfillment treat love with tenderness, but Klimt's erotic charge is most direct in his nudes. Water Serpents II, with its entwined female figures and streaming hair, belongs to that line, and more of it is gathered in our erotic collection of vintage prints.

How much are Klimt paintings worth? Prices vary widely from work to work. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I sold in 2006 for US$135 million, then a record price for a painting. The buyer, Ronald Lauder, would only confirm publicly that he paid more than the previous record of US$104.2 million, set by Picasso's Boy with a Pipe.

Did Klimt paint Adele Bloch-Bauer more than once? Yes. A second portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer II, exists. WikiArt dates the commission for that portrait to 1912. Klimt also painted her as Pallas Athena.

Which frame suits a Klimt poster? For Klimt's gold-heavy works, our preference is a black frame, which sets off the gold. Our black aluminium frame comes with acrylic glazing, and when you order it with a poster, we frame the poster free of charge.

About the author

We're the Moryarty team. Since 2015 we have found vintage posters in libraries, museums, online collections, private collections and markets, restored each one by hand, and printed it in house at our Barcelona workshop on museum-quality fine art paper. Klimt's gold and pattern depend on precise colour. Our restoration takes care never to change an original design or its colours, which is what those works need.

Sources

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