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拍品專文
The model for Klimt's first painting of Judith, 1901, (N. and D. no. 113), housed at the Österreichische Galerie, Vienna, has been identified as one of his most famous sitters, Adele Bloch-Bauer. This icon of a woman in an ecstatic trance was the first of two such accomplished treatments of this biblical femme fatale. In his second version, Judith II (Salome) of 1909, (N. and D. no. 160; fig. 1), housed at the International Gallery of Modern Art, Venice, Klimt monumentalized his subject further, with the sheer size of the painting and with the elongated view of the subject. Many series of Klimt's drawings document the artist's evolution between paintings, and each life study of his models illuminated a different aspect of a new painting being solved or resolved.
The present work, which shows a woman standing and reading - or perhaps studying a drawing - is one of several that Klimt made as he worked on his canvas of 1909. Another work from the Judith II series is Stehende von vorne (fig. 2), where Alice Strobl has identified the striking model as Berta Zuckerkandl. Two modes of activity were explored individually before these were unified in the painting. While the present work is a more meditative image, several other sketches for the painting depict the model dancing. Its is significant that these two activities, which would seem to be contradictory in their expressions, were both made in preparation for the same final canvas. In this finished painting, the woman is painted with her hands clutched deeply into her own dress, as she appears in the dancing drawings. Her expression, however, remains still, concentrated and removed. The opposite qualities of frenzy and contemplation have finally fused into a vision of rapture.
The present work, which shows a woman standing and reading - or perhaps studying a drawing - is one of several that Klimt made as he worked on his canvas of 1909. Another work from the Judith II series is Stehende von vorne (fig. 2), where Alice Strobl has identified the striking model as Berta Zuckerkandl. Two modes of activity were explored individually before these were unified in the painting. While the present work is a more meditative image, several other sketches for the painting depict the model dancing. Its is significant that these two activities, which would seem to be contradictory in their expressions, were both made in preparation for the same final canvas. In this finished painting, the woman is painted with her hands clutched deeply into her own dress, as she appears in the dancing drawings. Her expression, however, remains still, concentrated and removed. The opposite qualities of frenzy and contemplation have finally fused into a vision of rapture.