Gustav Klimt

Berta Zuckerkandl, Vienna (a gift from the artist circa 1907-1911)
Thence by descent to the present owner

Executed on cream wove paper, not laid down and t-hinged to the mount in three places along the upper edge. There is some slight mount staining to the extreme edges of the sheet, not visible when framed. The artist's Nachlass stamp is faintly visible on the lower right corner. There are some very minor spots of foxing, predominantly to the lower left quadrant, and a tiny nick to the upper right corner. This work is in overall good condition.
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Gustav Klimt gave the present work Liegender Akt mit langen Haaren to Berta Zuckerkandl, an Austrian writer, journalist and critic who was no doubt one of the most remarkable personalities of Viennese society during the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From the end of the 19th century until 1938, Zuckerkandl led an important literary salon in Vienna, frequented by many famous Viennese artists including Gustav Klimt. It is likely that the present work was gifted between 1907 and 1911 at a time when the relationship between Zuckerkandl and Klimt was at its closest. In 1908 Zuckerkandl published her book Zeitkunst Wien 1901–1907 (Contemporary Art 1901-1907) which contained an illustration of one of Klimt’s drawings, and in 1911 her article on Klimt’s Stoclet frieze, a series of three mosaics commissioned for the Stoclet Palais in Brussels, was published. At this point, the relationship seems to have relaxed as Klimt withdrew himself more and more from public life.

Without any assigned narrative and with the model’s red lips the only colourful focal point within the composition, the present work presents the model as the viewer's object of desire. The confidently drawn line demonstrates the sharpness of the artist's eye as well as his master draughtsmanship.

This compelling study of a nude is part of a series of nudes in different poses which Klimt drew in 1907 - and indeed developed throughout his career. Regine Schmidt comments on the importance of the theme in Klimt's œuvre: 'Gustav Klimt's work was and is such that one can lose oneself in it. His women, ladies and girls are mere forms of nature itself, flowers, as it were, that he drew and painted as they budded, blossomed and withered.... Like the later work of Franz Wiegele, his œuvre is a constant homage to woman. To Klimt, they were erotic creatures' (R. Schmidt, 'Of Sweet Young Things and Femmes Fatales: Gustav Klimt and Women around 1900. A Path to Freedom' in Gerbert Frodl & Tobias G. Natter (ed.), Klimt's Women,  Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 27 & 30).