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 like bodies caught in a current they cannot control. Children appear near the top, a young couple embraces, an old man covers his face at the bottom. To the right, a sphinx-like presence emerges from cosmic fog. At the lower edge a woman’s illuminated head—Knowledge—looks straight at us. Klimt himself described the work as showing, on the left, “the beginning of life, fruition, decay,” and on the right “the globe as mystery,” with knowledge rising from below. The picture was meant to celebrate reason on the ceiling of Vienna University’s Great Hall. Instead it became one of the most notorious lost masterpieces of modern art. The only complete records of its appearance are black-and-white photographs taken around 1900. 

From Imperial Commission to the Great Klimt Affair

In 1894 the Imperial and Royal Ministry of Education asked Gustav Klimt and Franz Matsch to decorate the ceiling of the newly built Great Hall of the University of Vienna. The official theme was “the triumph of light over darkness.” Matsch received the large central panel and the allegory of Theology. Klimt was given Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence. He did not begin serious work until 1898, after he had co-founded the Vienna Secession and abandoned the polished historicism of his earlier public commissions. The first version of Philosophy was shown at the seventh Secession exhibition in March 1900; Klimt continued to alter and enrich the canvas until 1907. What the university expected was a dignified allegory of rational inquiry. What it received was a dreamlike vision of humanity as a helpless chain of bodies moving through an inscrutable cosmos. 

Eighty-seven professors signed a petition against installing the painting. The rector declared that philosophy rested on the exact sciences. The controversy spilled into newspapers and even parliament. Yet the same work won a gold medal at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair. In 1905 Klimt repaid the state’s advance of 30,000 crowns with help from the collector August Lederer and withdrew from the commission entirely.

Paris Gold and Viennese Fury

The contrast between Paris and Vienna still startles. French juries saw a powerful modern allegory; Viennese academics saw an insult. Critics called the floating nudes pornographic and the composition a “viscous void.” One professor group wanted something closer to Raphael’s School of Athens. Klimt’s own studio was not tall enough for a canvas more than four metres high, so he rented extra space in a furniture factory on Florianigasse simply to be able to work on the picture. After he bought the paintings back, Philosophy entered the celebrated Lederer collection. 

The three faculty pictures were shown together one last time in 1928 at the Klimt memorial exhibition. After the Anschluss the Jewish Lederer family was dispossessed; the Nazis seized the works. In 1943 they were moved for safekeeping to Schloss Immendorf in Lower Austria. On 8 May 1945, the last day of the war in Europe, the castle burned. Whether the fire was started by timed explosives left by retreating German troops remains debated, but the painting and its two companion paintings are accepted as destroyed.

When Enlightenment Met the Will to Live

Philosophy marks the moment Klimt turned away from official optimism toward Symbolism and the darker currents of fin-de-siècle thought. The university wanted light conquering darkness; Klimt painted humanity as an instrument of cyclical, impersonal forces—an idea close to Schopenhauer’s Will and to contemporary fascination with Darwin and Ernst Haeckel. Knowledge does not master the universe; it merely gazes out from the bottom of the picture, the only figure that meets the spectator’s eye. The painting therefore functions less as an emblem of a faculty than as a meditation on the limits of reason. 

It belongs to the same cultural moment as Freud’s first publications and Nietzsche’s growing influence in Vienna. By refusing the expected heroic allegory, Klimt also ended his career as a state artist. After 1905 he accepted almost no public commissions and turned toward the richly decorative, gold-laden portraits and allegories that made him famous. The lost faculty paintings remain the clearest document of that rupture.

A Canvas Too Tall for the Studio

Philosophy was painted in oil on canvas and measured 430 by 300 centimetres (169.3 by 118.1 inches). The extreme height forced Klimt to work in a rented studio with a higher ceiling than his usual rooms on Josefstädter Strasse. Contemporary witnesses remembered a dominant harmony of greens and blues, with violet, grey and points of gold that read as stars in the photographs. Ludwig Hevesi called it “a mystical symphony of greens and blues”; another critic compared the right side to an aquarium bathed in green light. Because the original colour is gone, later reconstructions rely on those verbal descriptions, on Klimt’s surviving studies, and on the single known colour fragment from Medicine. 

Hundreds of preparatory drawings exist, many now in the Albertina; they show Klimt working out the floating nudes without feet or ground, as if the figures already inhabited a metaphysical void. 

Seized, Hidden, and Lost in the Last Fire of the War

The painting never reached the university ceiling for which it was commissioned. After Klimt repaid the advance in 1905 it passed to August and Serena Lederer. Their collection was “Aryanized” after 1938. During the war the work was stored at Schloss Immendorf together with Jurisprudence and Medicine (the last belonging to the Österreichische Galerie). The fire of 8 May 1945 consumed them. What survives are the photographs by Moriz Nähr, the many studies, contemporary colour descriptions, and the later reproductions and digital reconstructions.