Water Serpents II 1904-1907 CE

Water Serpents II (also called Freundinnen, or The Girlfriends) is an oil painting by Gustav Klimt, begun in 1904 and finished in 1906–1907. Across a long horizontal canvas, four nude female figures drift through an ornamental underwater world of flowers, serpentine forms, and glittering golden tendrils. Two women occupy the foreground: a blonde who turns toward the viewer with flushed cheeks and a direct, inviting gaze, and a red-haired figure seen more from behind, her hair dissolving into a field of blossoms. In the upper right, two further heads emerge from the pattern. There is no realistic waterline — only a decorative space in which skin, hair, and ornament melt into one another. The painting is at once fairy-tale and erotic: it draws the eye before revealing how complicated its history really is.

From an unfinished Secession canvas to a Golden Period masterpiece

Klimt started the painting in 1904, at the moment he was leaving academic convention behind and forging the style now called his Golden Period: flattened space, mosaic-like ornament, and an intense focus on the female body as both symbol and sensual presence.

An early, unfinished version appeared at the 20th Vienna Secession exhibition in 1904. In 1906–07 Klimt reworked it thoroughly. The reclining nude was shifted, given fuller curves and a more confrontational look. The number of figures grew from two to four. The dense floral decoration and the gold-toned “water plants” belong to this later campaign. The completed picture was first shown at the Kunstschau Wien in 1908, in the same milieu that presented The Kiss. The work closes a group of paintings devoted to water nymphs: Moving Water (1898), Medicine (1901), Goldfish (1902), and the smaller Water Serpents I (1904).

The son, the gauleiter, and the painting that vanished

After the Anschluss in 1938, Jenny Steiner fled to Portugal. The Nazis confiscated her collection. In 1940 the painting was scheduled for sale at the Dorotheum in Vienna, then withdrawn. Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach instead gave it to the film director Gustav Ucicky — Klimt’s illegitimate son with Maria Ucicka. Ucicky hung it in his dining room. When Ucicky died in 1961, his widow Ursula inherited the work. It was last shown publicly in Austria in 1964, at the Secession, then disappeared from view for nearly half a century. Many assumed it was lost.

When it resurfaced in 2012–13 it became one of the art market’s most talked-about deals: a restitution settlement, a private Sotheby’s sale, and then the so-called Bouvier affair, in which Russian collector Dmitry Rybolovlev paid far more than the sellers had received. The Steiner heirs used their share in part to found the New Klimt Foundation.

A quieter subplot sits in the drawings. In 1904 studies — reclining models, superimposed bodies, distant expressions — Klimt for the first time openly explored female intimacy and autoeroticism, themes the finished painting then clothes as nymphs and water serpents.

Nymphs as a veil for the forbidden

In Vienna around 1900, nude women in mythological disguise were acceptable. Open female homosexuality and autoeroticism were not. Water Serpents II exploits that gap. The figures can be read as naiads or water spirits — a classical subject. They can equally be read as a sensual scene among women, in which ornament both hides and heightens the bodies. The blonde’s gaze, the flushed cheeks, the slightly parted lips, and the suggestion of pubic hair are often cited in support of the second reading. The German title Wasserschlangen is itself double: it can mean real water snakes, or mythic serpents such as the Hydra. Klimt used that ambiguity as cover.

Artistically the painting belongs to Vienna Secession and Art Nouveau. It stands beside The Kiss and the Adele Bloch-Bauer portraits as a statement of Klimt’s Golden Period — less famous only because it spent so many decades out of sight. Later works such as The Friends (1916/17) treat lesbian intimacy more openly; here the myth still does the diplomatic work.

Oil, gold, and a composition that would not stay still

The medium is oil on canvas, enriched with ornamental patterning and metallic effects typical of the Golden Period (gold and silver leaf are often mentioned in descriptions of the series, though the surface of II is first and foremost oil paint built over a decorative ground). The dimensions are 80 × 145 cm (31.5 × 57.1 in). The orientation is horizontal, almost like a frieze — bodies travel left to right as if carried by a current. Compared with Water Serpents I, I is a much smaller mixed-media work on parchment, about 50 × 20 cm (19.7 × 7.9 in), now in the Belvedere. II is the large, painterly counterpart.

X-rays made at the Belvedere in 2023 revealed Klimt’s first underdrawings and the later changes to the nymphs, serpents, and golden vines. The 1904 state and the 1907 state are not the same picture. The prone nude was redrawn lower in the field; her expression became more seductive; her proportions grew more ample; a dark-haired head was added at upper right; masses of decorative flowers and gold water-plants were painted in last.

Klimt prepared the work with dozens of drawings. The 1904 sheets already stack bodies on top of one another, anticipating the crowded final design.

Looted, hidden, then sold for a fortune

Provenance in outline: Jenny Steiner, Vienna — acquired 1911; owned until 1938. Nazi confiscation after the Anschluss; slated for Dorotheum sale in 1940, then diverted. Gustav Ucicky (from 1940); after 1961, Ursula Ucicky. Last Austrian public showing: Secession, 1964. 2012–13 restitution deal between Ursula Ucicky and the Steiner heirs, mediated by the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien. Private sale via Sotheby’s for about $112 million, split 50/50. An Austrian export licence depended on that settlement. Yves Bouvier bought the painting and in 2013 sold it to Dmitry Rybolovlev for about $183.8 million. Rybolovlev later alleged that Bouvier had concealed his own ownership in order to inflate the price (part of the wider Bouvier affair). In 2015 Rybolovlev sold it on for about $170 million. The present owner is a private collection in Asia. For the 2022–23 exhibitions it was lent as courtesy of HomeArt, the Hong Kong advisory firm associated with Rosaline Wong. Earlier reports also linked the buyer to Qatar. The legal owner has not been publicly named with certainty.

Those prices made Water Serpents II for years the most expensive Klimt to change hands (later auction records for other Klimt portraits have since overtaken it). It still ranks among the world’s costliest paintings.

An X-ray in the palace stables

Because the work lived for decades in private rooms, its public condition history is thin. It was not a museum object with regular conservation files. When the Van Gogh Museum and then the Belvedere secured the loan, insurance costs exceeded what the Austrian state indemnity could cover. The owner paid the premium; in return the Belvedere examined and treated the painting.

Conservator Jahn used a large custom X-ray rig in the museum’s former-stables workshop. The scans mapped Klimt’s revisions. The canvas was cleaned and given conservation treatment so it could hang beside Water Serpents I in Vienna — the first time in nearly sixty years that II had been seen in Klimt’s own city. No major structural disaster (tears, large losses) has been reported in the press accounts of that campaign; the emphasis was on research, surface care, and making a long-hidden picture stable enough to travel and to be seen.

Today the painting is back in private hands. It remains, as it has been for most of its life, a masterpiece that the public meets only when a lender and a museum can agree on risk, insurance, and time.