Hope, II
Gustav Klimt (1862 to 1918) · 1907 to 1908
A pregnant woman stands in profile with her eyes closed and her head bowed, wrapped in a long robe patterned with circles and spirals in gold, orange and green. Her bare breast and the great curve of her belly rise out of the decoration, and just beneath the belly, easy to miss at first, a grey skull peers out. At her feet three women bow their heads with hands raised, as if in prayer or mourning. The background is a flat, dull gold that isolates the figure completely.
Klimt painted this at the height of his golden period, when he was using real gold and platinum leaf alongside oil paint, and the picture shows the two sides of his art in one frame: the naturalistic face and hands, painted with delicate softness, and the ornamental flatness of the robe, which belongs to the world of mosaics and Byzantine icons he had studied in Ravenna. Look at how the pattern of the robe is built from separate discs and squares, each one worked by hand, and how the gold catches the light differently as you move.
Klimt himself called the painting Vision. The title Hope came from an earlier canvas of a pregnant woman, now in Ottawa, and this one has been known as Hope, II by association ever since. The subject was daring in Vienna in 1908; pregnancy was rarely painted so openly, and the skull turns the picture into a meditation on birth and death together. MoMA acquired it in 1971 through the Jo Carole and Ronald Lauder and Helen Acheson Funds and by exchange. It is one of very few Klimts in an American museum.
Did You Know? Klimt applied real gold and platinum to the canvas, and the skull hidden beneath the belly is only visible once you know to look for it.
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