Antikes Griechenland und Antikes Ägypten

This is Klimt before the gold leaf and the scandals, before anyone thought of him as modern. In 1890 and 1891, still in his late twenties, he was running a decorating firm with his brother Ernst and a partner, Franz Matsch, and the three of them were handed the spaces high on the staircase of Vienna's new art-history museum. They painted 40 panels between the columns and above the arches, allegories of the ages of art. This pair sets a Greek woman beside an Egyptian one, cool and sculptural and entirely respectable. The panels were finished in the studio and glued to the walls in 1891, six months before the museum opened. You have to crane your neck to find them today.