About this work
*Judith I* is an oil on canvas work with gold leaf, painted in 1901 , and what meets the eye first is not a scene of triumph but something far more unsettling: a woman in the grip of private ecstasy. Klimt deliberately ignores any narrative reference and concentrates his pictorial rendering solely on Judith, cutting Holofernes' head off at the right margin — the vanquished general reduced to an afterthought, a pale fragment at the edge of the frame. Her slightly lifted head carries a sense of pride, while her visage is languid and sensual, with parted lips caught between defiance and seduction.
Her disheveled dark green, semi-sheer garment, giving the viewer a view of her nearly bare torso, alludes to the seduction that preceded the beheading.
She wears a gilded and jeweled choker that underscores her elegance. Behind her, gilded hills and fig trees appear to be styled after relief sculptures from the palace of the Assyrian king Sennacherib in ancient Nineveh — a background that is at once historically grounded and purely decorative, shimmering with gold leaf against which her dark hair creates a stark, electric contrast.
*Judith I* is the first work of Klimt's Golden Phase, in which the artist began using gold in his canvases.
The painting reflects the refined decadence of turn-of-the-century Vienna, when the arts flourished as never before and the city produced a host of star names — among them Egon Schiele, Gustav Mahler, and Sigmund Freud.
Although Judith had typically been interpreted as the pious widow simply fulfilling a higher duty, in *Judith I* she is a paradigm of the femme fatale Klimt repeatedly portrayed in his work.
Klimt transformed the biblical story of resistance in a political conflict into a battle of the sexes, and Judith's triumph into a dangerously tantalizing icon of femininity.
Despite some alteration of features, one can recognise Klimt's friend and possible lover, Viennese socialite Adele Bloch-Bauer, who would later be the subject of two formal portraits.
Contemporary Viennese society found the painting so scandalous that for a long time it was erroneously known as *Salome*. It now hangs at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna, one of the highlights of the world's largest Gustav Klimt collection.
On a wall, *Judith I* commands rather than decorates.
