Portraiture

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.