Bewegtes Wasser

Klimt painted this in 1898, the year Vienna's rebel artists opened their own exhibition hall. He had helped found the Secession a year earlier, walking out on the city's official art establishment to show work on their own terms, and 1898 was their first full season. You can feel him loosening here. Instead of the polished historical scenes that had made his early reputation, he lets nude figures drift and dissolve in dark water, more mood than story. Women adrift in water would become one of his lifelong subjects. He kept reworking this canvas over the next few years, reluctant to call it finished.