Jurisprudence (1903-1907 CE)
A courtroom without mercy. That is the first impression Jurisprudence still makes, even though the original canvas has been gone for eighty years and survives only in photographs.
Artist Gustav Klimt
Medicine (1898-1907 CE)
Gustav Klimt’s Medicine is one of the great missing paintings of European modernism: a vast, unsettling allegory of birth, suffering, eros, and death, painted for the ceremonial hall of the University of Vienna.
Philosophy (1907 CE)
Gustav Klimt’s Philosophy is a painting that asks the viewer to look into a universe that does not answer back. On a vast canvas, naked figures drift through a green-blue mist.
Adam and Eve (1918 CE)
Adam and Eve is an unfinished oil painting that is both intimate and monumental. In a tall, narrow canvas, a luminous, full-bodied Eve stands facing the viewer
Portrait of a Lady (1916–1917 CE)
Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of a Lady, painted in 1916–1917, shows a young woman turning to glance over her shoulder with an expression that feels both intimate and slightly distant.
Posthumous Portrait of Ria Munk III (1917 CE)
Gustav Klimt’s Posthumous Portrait of Ria Munk III is a painting that looks, at first glance, like a celebration. A young woman turns toward us with flushed cheeks and a quiet smile.
Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl (1914 CE)
A life history he could not have imagined. The portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl is one of Gustav Klimt's last works left incomplete when he died in 1918.
Portrait of Friederike Maria Beer (1916 CE)
This is Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Friederike Maria Beer, painted in 1916: a late masterpiece in which a living sitter and an invented oriental screen meet on a single plane of color.
Death and Life (1910-1911 CE)
Gustav Klimt’s Death and Life (Tod und Leben), a painting that feels less like a finished statement than like a conversation the artist kept having with himself.
Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914-1916 CE)
Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, painted between 1914 and 1916, is a life-size image of a twenty-year-old heiress standing at the edge of a world about to vanish.
Portrait of Mäda Primavesi (1912 CE)
Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Mäda Primavesi does not behave like a typical child’s portrait. A nine-year-old girl stands full-length against a field of lilac and scattered blossoms.
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912 CE)
A second portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer reveals a different Klimt, a different Adele, and a story that stretches from a Viennese salon to Nazi confiscation, American courtrooms, and a private collection on the other side of the world.
Portrait of Fritza Riedler (1906 CE)
In Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Fritza Riedler of 1906, a middle-aged woman sits as if on a throne, pale and composed, while the world around her dissolves into ornament.
Portrait of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein (1905 CE)
Portrait of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein does not glitter like the later “golden” pictures, yet it already contains their tension: a living face set inside an almost architectural ornament.
Portrait of Emilie Flöge (1902 CE)
Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Emilie Flöge does not greet the viewer with the glittering armor of his later golden works. Instead it offers something quieter and stranger..