Judith
Gustav Klimt (1862 to 1918) · 1901
A woman looks at you through half-closed eyes, her lips parted, her head tilted back with a heavy gold collar at her throat. It takes a moment to notice what she holds in the lower right corner: the severed head of a bearded man, cut off by the frame. She is Judith, the heroine of the Old Testament who beheaded the Assyrian general Holofernes to save her city, but Klimt has turned the story of a pious widow into something much more unsettling. His Judith is a modern Viennese woman in a state of ecstasy, and the violence is somewhere between triumph and pleasure.
Look at the way the picture is built in vertical strips. Gold fills the top, with stylised trees and fruit that Klimt took from Assyrian reliefs. The transparent dress falls open in a band of ornament. Her skin is painted softly and naturalistically, which makes the surrounding flatness all the stranger. The frame is part of the work: it was made by Klimt's brother Georg, a metalworker, with the names Judith and Holofernes hammered into the copper, and Klimt chose it so that no one could mistake the subject for the more famous Salome.
This was the first painting in which Klimt used real gold leaf, several years before The Kiss, and it announced the whole golden period. Critics of the time were shocked and fascinated in equal measure. One thing to notice before you move on: her right hand rests on the head almost tenderly, with the fingers spread in the hair, a gesture that says more about Klimt's view of desire than any of the gold around it.
Did You Know? The copper frame, made by Klimt's brother Georg, spells out the names Judith and Holofernes because contemporaries kept mistaking the subject for Salome.
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