Art in Ads · 06

Meet a Klimt Without Any Gold

Gold Klimt is on umbrellas and coffee mugs. This girl, though, has not a single flake of gold leaf.

Gustav Klimt, Mäda Primavesi (1903–2000), 1912–13

Mäda Primavesi (1903–2000)

Gustav Klimt1912–13

01Where you've seen it

Klimt's The Kiss turns up on umbrellas, mugs, puzzles and scarves. In 2015 the true story behind his golden Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I became the movie Woman in Gold. Helen Mirren played Maria Altmann, who fought to get back the painting the Nazis had taken from her family.

After a long legal battle the painting was returned to Altmann in 2006, and that same year it went to the Neue Galerie in New York.

02The real story

The Klimt at Pyeongye has no gold leaf at all. It is Mäda Primavesi, painted in 1912 and 1913. A nine-year-old girl in a white dress stands with her feet apart and looks straight at us. Between a violet wall and a flowered floor, she owns the middle of the picture.

By then Klimt had moved past the gold-leaf years of The Kiss and was filling his canvases with bright paint and patterns of flowers. Mäda was born in 1903 and lived until 2000. Klimt died in Vienna in 1918, a few years after painting her.

Tell a friend like this

Show this to anyone who only knows golden Klimt. He could fill a whole canvas with one nine-year-old girl and no gold at all.

One line is enough.
Next time that painting shows up, your friend will spot it first.

See this painting up close →