Gustav Klimt

1862 Vienna - 1918 Vienna

  • Title Study for a painting of Dora Breisach
  • Date around 1917
  • Technic pencil on paper
  • Dimensions 49.9 x 32.2 cm
  • Signature signed lower right: GUSTAV / KLIMT
  • Provenance Sale, Dorotheum, Vienna, 10 November 1993, lot 450; private collection, Great Britain; Sotheby"s, London, 22 June 2017, lot 355; Property sold to benefit a charitable trust created by the late William de Gelsey, private collection, Great Britain
  • Other The artwork will be included by Dr. Marian Bisanz-Prakken in the forthcoming supplementary volume to Alice Strobl‘s catalogue raisonné of Gustav Klimt‘s drawings.
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In the work of Gustav Klimt, the strictly frontal female figure – whether as a shoulder, bust, or full-length portrait – first appears in the years before and during the founding of the Secession in 1897. This motif of intense fixation, or even hypnosis, was programmatic and was connected with allegorical figures as in the paintings "Pallas Athene" (1898) or "The Naked Truth" (1899). It was also connected with decadence, as in "Judith I" (1901) or in the provocative nudity of the "Three Gorgons" in the "Beethoven Frieze" (1901/02), in which the frontal and profile positions dictated by the architecture were of particular significance. In representations such as these, the frontal view, which is frequently found in Klimt's portraiture and which he was particularly interested in in his final creative years, has its roots. Famous examples are the portraits of the standing Adele Bloch-Bauer (1912), Eugenia and Mäda Primavesi (1913 and 1913/14), Elisabeth Lederer (1914-1916), Johanna Staude (1917, unfinished) or Amalie Zuckerkandl (1917, unfinished). In the relevant studies, Klimt emphasizes the strict adherence to the surface by allowing the model, partially or fully realized, to overlap the edges of the paper. With this standard formula rooted in Symbolism, he internalizes the dialectic between proximity and distance: the deliberate fragmentation separates the depicted figure from the viewer and at the same time allows them to come very close. The present study of a frontally seated female figure fits into this broad context. Stylistically and thematically, the work approaches the drawings for the portrait of Margarethe Constance Lieser (1917, unfinished), but the form and expression of the face point more towards the simultaneously created studies for a portrait of Dora Breisach, which according to Alice Strobl was never completed. The fascinating effect of the loose, almost painterly strokes, through which the centrally fixed female figure seems to glow from within, is undeniable. In this tension between the metaphysical lightness and the strict adherence to the surface lies the quintessence of Klimt's late graphic work.

original german text by Marian Bisanz-Prakken