Adam und Eva

Klimt was working on this when he died. Early in 1918 he suffered a stroke, then pneumonia, and the canvas was found unfinished in his Vienna studio alongside several others. You can read that incompleteness in the picture itself. Eve stands in front, pale and touched with gold and fully alive, while Adam behind her is barely lifted out of the dark ground, more shadow than man. It was only the second time Klimt took up a biblical subject, and he flipped the usual roles, making the woman the bright, waking presence and the man the sleeping one. The painting later passed from his estate to Sonja Knips, a friend he had portrayed years before.