Austria

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.

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.

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.

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 does not glitter like the later “golden” pictures, yet it already contains their tension: a living face set inside an almost architectural ornament.

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..

Study of an Old Man with Ivy Wreath, painted around 1888–1890, shows an elderly man in strict profile, his long grey beard falling over a brown coat, a living crown of ivy leaves circling his thinning hair.

Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Marie Henneberg is not a picture that happened to find a wall. It was conceived for a specific place: the tall entrance hall of a new villa on Vienna’s Hohe Warte.