About Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt (14 July 1862 – 6 February 1918) was an Austrian Symbolist painter and a founding member of the Vienna Secession movement.
His work helped define the Art Nouveau style in Europe.
Born in Vienna into a lower middle-class family, his father Ernst worked as an engraver and goldsmith — a craft that would leave an unmistakable imprint on his son's aesthetic.
In 1876, Klimt earned a scholarship to the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, where he studied until 1883 and received training as an architectural painter.
His early work had a classical style typical of late 19th-century academic painting, as seen in his murals for the Vienna Burgtheater (1888) and on the staircase of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. That conventional success, however, proved to be a point of departure rather than a destination. In 1897, Klimt and a group of like-minded artists resigned from the Vienna Artists' Association and founded the Vienna Secession — a decisive break that freed him to pursue a radically personal visual language. Life, love, and death can be determined as the important themes of Klimt's work, pursued through roughly one large-format portrait of a woman per year, rendered in the Art Nouveau principles of flatness, decoration, and gold leaf, alongside allegories and Old Testament heroines transformed into dangerous femmes fatales.
During the early years of the Secessionist movement, Klimt began incorporating gold leaf into his paintings — the development that would define his so-called "Golden Phase," with *Pallas Athena* (1898) often considered its earliest example and *Judith I* (1901) another notable milestone.
In 1903, Klimt traveled to Ravenna, where he admired the Byzantine mosaics of the Basilica San Vitale — an influence unmistakable in the height of his Golden Phase, including *Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I* (1907) and *The Kiss* (1907–08).
*The Kiss* — depicting a man and woman locked in an embrace, created using oil paint and silver, gold, and platinum leaf to produce a shimmering, mosaic effect — is now held in
About this work
(also known as *Salomé*) is an oil on canvas painted in 1909, measuring a strikingly elongated 178 by 46 centimetres, and held today at the Ca' Pesaro International Gallery of Modern Art in Venice.
Where *Judith I* presented the heroine face-on, directly confronting the viewer, here Klimt shows her in profile — body bent slightly forwards, turning sharply to the left, eyes fixed on some distant, unreachable horizon.
The eye is drawn from her distinctive face down to her brazenly exposed chest, then further still to her splayed hands clutching a sack — from the bottom of which the severed head of Holofernes emerges.
The gilded frame remains, but the background of the painting itself has shifted: gold is gone, replaced by a deep, warm orange-red — a signal that after *The Kiss*, Klimt had abandoned gold leaf as his primary decorative device and turned to colour instead.
Against that smouldering ground, Judith's dress seethes with embellishment — elongated triangles, spiral shapes in contrasting shades of grey, enlivened by brilliant floral detail, all culminating in a striped, kaleidoscopic scarf at her head.
Eight years after his controversial *Judith I*, Klimt returned to the same Old Testament figure — a woman who used her physical charms to seduce the Assyrian general Holofernes and then beheaded him to save the Jewish people — because for him and his contemporaries, Judith embodied the femme fatale: eroticism and danger fused into a single form.
By placing Judith in a dynamic, forward-leaning pose, Klimt appears to deliberately invoke Salome's Dance of the Seven Veils — so successfully that the painting was misidentified as *Salomé* for many years.
For this work, Klimt adopted the Oriental *kakemono* format — the extreme vertical — underlining the importance of Japonism to the broader Secessionist project.
The painting debuted in 1910 at the ninth Venice Biennale, where Klimt was given his own dedicated room, and Ca' Pesaro acquired it immediately upon exhibition — a decisively far-sighted purchase.
Where *Judith I* held magnetic fascination and sensuality, this second version abandons warmth for sharper traits and a fierce, unsettled expression — a meaningful evolution in how Klimt understood the figure.
On the wall, *Judith II* rewards a room that can absorb its intensity — a narrow, tall format that commands vertical space without overwhelming it. It suits high-ceilinged interiors with dark
