Zwei liegende Frauenakte

Klimt's drawings are among the finest creations in the artist's oeuvre. This is particularly true of his later years, when drawing became, in many ways, the key area of his artistic exploration. From 1911 onwards, Klimt's drawings of women, which undoubtedly were his greatest obsession, form an increasingly large part of his artistic output. Women were for him as fundamental to his art as drawing was. Although Klimt's erotic drawings were intended solely for his own private use, they form a large and key part of his late oeuvre and underlie a wider attempt to raise sexuality to the level of art. Throughout his life, the overt sexuality of Klimt's works had manifested itself and in his late work he sought, through important allegorical paintings like Die Freundinnen, Die Jungfrau and Die Braut, to establish sexuality as life's fundamental motivating force. Working in the city of Sigmund Freud, Klimt's aims are reflective of much progressive thinking in fin de siècle Vienna. Abandoning the femme fatale of earlier years, Klimt's late works primarily focus on the passive woman, caught asleep, dreaming, or sexually aroused. At the same time, the artist adventured in a previously even less charted territory - the depiction of lesbian sexuality and homosexual love. His fascination with the mystery of the woman finds in these compositons its most intense depiction.

Stylistically, this work is particularly striking. Klimt's naked women are often placed on the empty page with an unerring sense of accuracy. The delicate and usually only outlined form is always positioned perfectly amidst the vast empty white space around her. In this drawing, he beautifully played around the womens' embrace, their abandonment and pleasure masterly expressed with the most synthetic of eans - pen and ink on paper.