Gustav Klimt - Hope, II

Gustav Klimt (Austrian, 1862 - 1918)
Hope, II. 1907-08
Oil, gold , and platinum on canvas, 43" x 43" (110.5 x 110.5 cm)
Mr. and Mrs. Ronald S. Lauder and Helen Acheson Funds, and Serge Sabarsky

At the turn of the century, Vienna was the cultural hub of Central Europe. Its leadership, however, depended less on the visual arts than on its contributions to music, with composers such as Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Arnold Schoenberg, and on the modern architecture pioneered by Otto Wagner, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann, and Adolf Loos. This situation changed in 1897 when a group of artists broke away from the conservative K¸nstlerhaus that dominated art exhibitions to form a new organization, the Secession. It was dedicated to showing the most advanced work of Austrian and foreign artists and to realizing the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, propounded by Richard Wagner. The group's selection of the thirty-five-year-old Gustav Klimt as president was a somewhat surprising choice, for until he decided to cast in his lot with the young rebels, he had achieved a reputation as a decorative painter who executed commissions for official buildings in an eclectic, academic style.

Commissioned to decorate the ceiling of the Assembly Hall in the University of Vienna, Klimt painted three panels to represent Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence. Included in the complex allegory of Medicine was a pregnant woman, a motif that Klimt developed further in an easel painting, Hope, I, now in the National Gallery of Art at Ottawa. This he proposed to include in a major retrospective of his work to be held in November 1903 at the Eighteenth Exhibition of the Vienna Secession, but he withdrew it on the advice of the Minister of Culture and Education, who deemed the portrayal of a nude woman in an advanced state of pregnancy too shocking to be exposed to the public. The work was purchased by Klimt's friend Fritz Waerndorfer, who screened it behind double doors in his home lest it offend visitors.

In I907-08, Klimt again took up the theme in Hope, II, which during his lifetime bore the title Vision. Embodying the intertwined ideas of love, birth, and death that recur frequently in his art, it is a Symbolist work that, like Redon's Silence, is subject to various interpretations. The composition differs radically from the first version, for here the woman is clothed, except for her bared breasts; with bent head and upraised hand, she seems to be praying for the safe delivery of her expected child, menaced by a death's head half hidden above her protuberant belly. A group of women below join their petitions to hers. Symmetrically placed in the center of the picture, the woman with ramrod-straight back and small head set above an unnaturally elongated body appears, in Fritz Novotny's words, like a "human column on a square of canvas."

Klimt's father was a goldsmith, and the artist's respect for craftsmanship and love of precious metals led him to develop his so-called "golden" style. Inspired by his experience of the sixth-century mosaics of Ravenna that he saw on trips to Italy in 1903 and 1904, Klimt sought to re-create the exotic splendor of the Orient, drawing upon sources as diverse as Byzantine art, Mycenean metalwork, Persian miniatures, and Japanese screens.

In Hope, II, the rounded forms of the figure's swelling breasts contrast with the flat, richly patterned robe, set off against a dark, flecked background. In a sensuous display of luxurious ornamentation, golden ovals of various sizes float across the surface, and a filigree of golden spirals further dazzles the eye.

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