Klimt’s Women

Viennese artist Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) expressed a dedication to the theme of “woman” throughout his life — in his early historical paintings, in allegorical depictions and erotic drawings, and in classic large female portraits. At the turn of the century, Klimt created a completely new type of picture with his sumptuously ornamented female portraits.

This gorgeously illustrated book offers for the first time a survey of Klimt’s approach to the female form. The volume includes a great number of his works depicting women, and it examines how fundamental changes in the social structure at the turn of the century led to new positions for women on both ideological and cultural levels. The contributors to the book discuss such topics as Vienna’s cultural role in 1900, the importance of the affluent bourgeoisie, patronage, and the myth of “Whole Art” (Gesamtkunstwerk). The book also illuminates Klimt’s idiosyncratic treatment of the female in relation to her European background and sets his work against various interpretations of this theme in key works by contemporary artists including Ferdinand Hodler, Fernand Khnopff, Oskar Kokoschka, Hans Makart, Edouard Manet, Edvard Munch, and Egon Schiele.