Judith in Gold

On Gustav Klimt's "Judith I" and the woman behind that captivating gaze.

Detail of Judith I, Gustav Klimt ca. 1901. Via the Belvedere.

The city of Bethulia is under siege by the Assyrian army, whose mighty forces threaten to march onward to Jerusalem. The widow Judith decides to take matters into her own hands—she steals into the Assyrian camp and uses her beauty and wits to charm the general Holofernes.

One night, Judith is invited to his tent. Holofernes has had too much to drink. Witnessing the warrior reduced to a stupor, Judith takes her chance. She decapitates the general and brings his severed head back to her people. With the loss of their leader, the Assyrian forces flee.

Judith I, Gustav Klimt ca. 1901. Via the Belvedere.

Centuries later, another Jewish woman poses as Judith for one of the leading Art Nouveau artists of her time. Many painters have brought the story of Judith to life, but Gustav Klimt’s first rendition is unique. Rather than depicting Judith in the act of beheading, we see the aftermath. His Judith is an intimate, erotically-charged portrait. The composition is tightly-framed to her face and torso. She stands against a backdrop modeled on an Assyrian relief, rendered on the canvas in gold. Her diaphanous blouse and bejeweled choker gesture to an ancient past, though her hair is a decidedly contemporary updo, tethering her to fin-de-siècle Vienna. Judith stands proud, shoulders back, her eyes and lips half-parted in ecstasy. The head of Holofernes is an afterthought, tucked into the bottom-right corner of the painting.

Fragment of an Assyrian Relief with Battle Scenes, originally from the Northern Palace in Nineveh, mid-seventh century B.C.

Klimt brought Judith to life in 1901. It was the age of psychoanalysis and anxiety regarding sexuality, especially that of women. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (from whom the word “masochist” derives) wrote of Judith in Venus in Furs (1870). The protagonist Severin states, “While reading the Book of Judith, I envied the ferocious hero, Holofernes, because of the regal woman who decapitated him with a sword; I envied him that lovely, bloody end.”¹

Another femme fatale had captured the public’s imagination toward the end of the 19th-century: Salomé, thanks to the success of Oscar Wilde’s play, which was published in French in 1893 and staged in 1896. (It would serve as the inspiration for Richard Strauss’s opera.)

Gustav Klimt was fascinated by female sexuality, as were many of his intellectual contemporaries. But rather than fearing or scorning them, he made women into idols and cloaked them in gold.

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My readers have been graciously supportive of my series on the Impressionists. Next year, we will turn to a new crop of artistic revolutionaries when we explore the Vienna Secession, of which Gustav Klimt was an important leader. Today, I would like to share a bit about the artist’s use of gold leaf, as well as some insight into the woman who posed for Judith I.

Gustav Klimt found success painting the Viennese bourgeoisie, though he came from a very different station in life. His family was in the trades—his father was a gold engraver from Bohemia, and his mother was a singer whose career in the opera sadly never took off.² Klimt and his brothers were encouraged to follow in their father’s footsteps, and after training under his supervision, the young Gustav entered the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) at fourteen. The timing was golden (no pun intended): Klimt graduated an an architectural decorator right when Vienna’s iconic Ringstrasse was entering its final stage of construction. Early opportunities included creating history paintings for the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Burgtheater.³ Like the Impressionists, he felt increasingly stifled by a conservative establishment, and he became a founding member of the Vienna Secession movement.

Klimt started incorporating gold leaf into his art in 1895, first to frame panels such as his Portrait of Josef Lewinsky, then as a background accent, until it became a significant material in his work. The last time gold was a dominant material in Western art was the late medieval/early Renaissance period. The 1400s in Italy marked an essential transition; by the end of that century, art was valued less by the costliness of a piece’s materials and instead by the artist’s rarity of skill.

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, Gustav Klimt ca. 1907. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Klimt’s use of gold leaf is both a celebration of the past (his father’s lineage and the artists of bygone eras), as well as a leap forward, in which geometric motifs are paired with realistic depictions of the human face. In Judith I, the protagonist of the story leaps from the canvas, though the rest of the composition reminds us that we are not observing the world as it is, but a woman on a mystical plane. In Klimt’s portrait, Judith is indeed the stuff of legend.

The woman who served as the model for Judith I was in some ways a legendary figure, too. You may recognize the Viennese socialite Adele Bloch-Bauer from several of Klimt’s paintings, including her famous portrait that now hangs in the Neue Galerie in New York City (above).

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) is a large, awe-inspiring painting. At 140-by-140 centimeters, the image feels even larger due to its overwhelming use of gold leaf.

Adele herself was a larger-than-life personality who moved beyond the conventions set out for women of her class. She was an intellectual who surrounded herself with journalists, artists, and scientists; she hosted salons for leading thinkers of the period and became an influential patron of the arts. She possessed a voracious appetite for knowledge, and her interests ranged from medicine and science to art and classic literature. In her words:

You cannot receive knowledge or high literacy from a High School education, nor from University professors. You have to proceed with open eyes and an iron will to become thoroughly educated. Only the person who places the highest demands on himself can progress one step further. Self satisfied individuals are incapable of development.⁴

Gustav Klimt had countless lovers, though it’s unclear if Adele was one of them. Her niece Maria Altmann would later reflect, “People always ask me, did your aunt have a mad affair with Klimt? My sister thought so. My mother—she was very Victorian—said, ‘How dare you say that? It was an intellectual friendship.’”⁵

When Adele died in 1925, her wish was that her art by Gustav Klimt would be left to the Belvedere in Vienna, though technically, these works weren’t hers to give away. Legally, they were the property of her husband, Ferdinand. (Though if Adele knew the horrors that were to come, it’s doubtful that she would have left the paintings to Austria.)

When the Nazis took over the Austrian government, Ferdinand was forced to flee to Switzerland, and the Nazis stole his assets and his art collection. To conceal the sitter’s Jewish identity, they called Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I “The Woman in Gold” or “The Lady in Gold.”

As covered brilliantly in Anne Marie O’Connor’s The Lady in Gold, the painting became the subject of a watershed U.S. Supreme Court case, Republic of Austria v. Altmann (2004), in which the court ruled that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 can apply retroactively to acts prior to that year. Maria Altmann and her husband narrowly escaped Austria during World War II; Altmann was able to successfully sue Austria for the return of her family’s stolen paintings, and this became an example for future art restitution cases.

The provenance of Judith I is, thankfully, above-board. Almost immediately after Klimt finished Judith, he sold it to the Swiss symbolist artist Ferdinand Holler. Holler and Klimt possessed strong appreciation for each other’s art, and Holler kept Judith in his collection until he passed. In 1954, his family sold the piece to the Belvedere, where it hangs today.

Judith II, Gustav Klimt ca. 1909. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Klimt would paint another Judith in 1909, as he was moving away from his “gold period.” Judith II offers a rather different portrait of the biblical heroine, one brimming with psychological distress. Her eyes and lips are half-parted, but instead of the erotic expression of Judith I, we see a woman consumed by the act she committed. She is barely holding onto Holofernes’s head by his hair. In fairness, this is a more emotionally-realistic rendition of what Judith may have been feeling after decapitating Holofernes, even if she saved her city in the process.

But Judith I is the work to which I’ll return, over and over again. I saw it for the first time when I was nineteen years old, and I was struck by the power of this intimate portrait. I grew captivated by the painting’s numinous quality, just as Holler was entranced over a century ago. Judith I embodies the mystery of an ancient deity, a goddess in gold—close enough to touch, yet never quite breaching that distance. She has been immortalized on canvas, and a secret will forever linger in her gaze.

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Related from The Crossroads Gazette:

The Impressionist Exhibition, 150 Years Later

Art, Commerce, and the Role of the Patron

1. Eva di Stefano, Gustav Klimt: Art Nouveau Visionary, translated by Stephen Jackson (Sterling, 2008), 96.

2. Di Stefano, Gustav Klimt, 20.

3. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Vintage Books, 1981; originally published in 1961), 209.

4. Anne Marie O’Connor, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (Vintage Books, 2012), 46-47.

5. O’Connor, The Lady in Gold, xviii.