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. Flowers crowd around her head like a second, brighter world. Then the eye drops, and the spell breaks. Her dress is barely there: charcoal lines, thin washes of paint and an empty canvas. The work is both a finished vision and an interrupted sentence. Klimt began it around 1917 and left it on the easel when he died in February 1918. The woman he was painting had already been dead for six years.

What remains is one of his last great standing portraits: oil and charcoal on canvas, about 180.7 by 89.9 centimeters (71.1 by 35.4 inches). It is intimate and monumental at once, tender in the face and almost violently decorative behind it. The unfinished surface does not feel like a defect. It feels like the moment when memory, grief, and painting all ran out of time.

A Shot, a Family, a Commission

Maria “Ria” Munk was born in 1887 into a wealthy Jewish industrial family in Vienna. Her father, Alexander Munk, was a prominent businessman. Her mother, Aranka Munk, née Pulitzer, belonged to a circle that mattered for Klimt’s career: Aranka’s sister was Serena Lederer, the artist’s most important patron. Ria grew up inside that glittering, nervous world of fin-de-siècle Vienna, where art, money, and private catastrophe often shared the same drawing rooms.

On 28 December 1911, at the age of twenty-four, she shot herself in the chest. The trigger was a broken engagement. She had been involved with the writer Hanns Heinz Ewers, a specialist in the macabre, and he ended the relationship by letter around Christmas. In Vienna the suicide caused talk but little lasting scandal. Arthur Schnitzler noted the event in his diary at the New Year. The family, however, was not interested in words. They wanted an image they could live with. Because of the Lederer connection, they turned to Klimt. The first request was a deathbed portrait, a genre still fashionable in bourgeois Vienna. Klimt painted Ria as a modern Ophelia, lying among flowers, pale and peaceful. Aranka found the image too raw. She did not want to remember her daughter as a corpse. A second portrait was commissioned, this time as if Ria were alive. That painting, according to later testimony from Serena Lederer’s son Erich, displeased the family as well. Many scholars now believe Klimt later transformed it into Die Tänzerin (The Dancer), today in the Neue Galerie in New York. Only then did he begin the third and last attempt, the tall standing figure we know as Ria Munk III.

He was still working on it when a stroke ended his own life in 1918. Subject and painter were both gone. 

The Novel, the Likeness Problem, and a Root That Does Not Belong

Klimt himself admitted the difficulty. In 1913 he wrote to Emilie Flöge that the Munk portrait “wouldn’t come together” and that he could not get the likeness right. That complaint belongs to the second attempt, but it explains the whole series. He had no living sitter. The face in the third portrait was almost certainly built from photographs and from the earlier deathbed image, then tested through dozens of drawings in which models posed wrapped in patterned cloth. 

The most unsettling detail sits high on the right: a pale, branched, pinkish form that art historians have read as a mandrake root. In folklore the mandrake is a toxic “magic root” shaped like a body, tied to desire, fertility, and death. The choice is unlikely to be accidental. Shortly before Ria died, Ewers published his novel Alraune (Mandrake), about a beautiful and destructive woman created by an occult experiment. Vienna already linked the book to the affair. On the canvas, the root breaks into a field of “good” flowers—tulips, roses, peonies, a white-blue hyacinth held to the face—as if a foreign organism had entered a garden of luck and beauty. Whether Klimt meant a private accusation, a literary wink, or a symbol of hostile forces he had used before in Hope I and the Beethoven Frieze, the object refuses to sit quietly in the decoration.

Woman, Flower, and the Late Klimt

By 1917 Klimt had left behind the heavy gold of the so-called golden period. The late portraits embed the sitter in color, pattern, and floral abundance until figure and ground almost exchange roles. Ria Munk III belongs to that last cycle of tall female portraits, alongside works such as the second Adele Bloch-Bauer and the unfinished Bride. The low viewpoint and the dense backdrop give the woman an aura, as if she were not standing in a room but growing out of an invented landscape.

The flowers are not mere prettiness. In Chinese pictorial tradition, which Klimt studied through prints and objects in his studio, certain blossoms stand for happiness, wealth, beauty, and long family life. The hyacinth at Ria’s cheek can mean romantic love in one culture and the afterlife in another. Klimt’s studio was full of kimonos, Japanese pillar prints, Chinese pictures, and textiles. Critics already in the 1920s called his spirit “entirely oriental.” Here that taste becomes a way to dress a dead girl in a world that never existed for her: a radiant, patterned eternity instead of a coffin.

Oil, Charcoal, and a Narrow Field of Color

The painting is oil and charcoal on canvas. Its height is 180.7 centimeters (71.1 inches) and its width 89.9 centimeters (35.4 inches), a tall, narrow format Klimt favored for standing women, close in spirit to Japanese “hashira-e”, or pillar prints. He drew directly on the canvas in charcoal, then built the head and the floral architecture in oil while leaving the costume as a web of lines. The contrast is a deliberate working method, not an accident. Other late canvases left in the studio show the same sequence: likeness and environment first, clothing last. Because so much of the figure is still drawing, the surface records decisions that finished Klimts usually hide. You can see him searching for the fall of a sleeve, the press of an arm against the body, the point where patterned fabric should swallow the outline. 

The background is already a collage of sources—European still life, East Asian ornament, invented tendrils—applied with a looser, more painterly touch. The work is unsigned, as many of the studio leftovers were. Its power comes less from polish than from the visible argument between line and color, grief and decoration, a face that is done and a life likewise.

From a Lakeside Villa to a Restituted Sale

After 1918 the portrait belonged to Aranka Munk and hung at Bad Aussee. Following the Anschluss, her property was registered as Jewish. In October 1941 she was deported with her younger daughter Lola to the Łódź ghetto. Aranka died there that November. Lola was murdered at Chełmno in 1942. The villa and its contents were seized; by 1942 Nazi officials were already noting “the valuable portrait of a lady by Gustav Klimt.”

The picture passed to the dealer Wolfgang Gurlitt and, in the 1950s, into the collection of the city of Linz, later the Lentos Kunstmuseum, where it was often listed simply as a portrait of a lady. Provenance research by Sophie Lillie and legal pressure from the heirs, led by the lawyer Alfred Noll, established the seizure. In June 2009 Linz agreed to return the work. On 23 June 2010 Christie’s London sold Frauenbildnis (Portrait of Ria Munk III) for 18.8 million pounds. The buyer was the British collector Joe Lewis. It has since remained in private hands, occasionally shown on loan.

The journey is almost as layered as the paint. A suicide in imperial Vienna, an unfinished canvas in a wartime studio, a villa emptied by the Gestapo, a museum wall in Linz, an auction room in London: each stage added a new kind of absence. What the viewer meets now is still the same unfinished smile—Klimt’s last attempt to give Aranka Munk a daughter who could look back at her family.