Beethoven Frieze (plate 6, center wall): The Hostile Powers

On the second half of the end wall, one figure stands by herself. Klimt's programme calls her Gnawing Grief, a thin woman wrapped in a grey veil, head bowed, long black hair falling over her face. Filling the panel behind her is the body of the giant Typhoeus, here a mass of patterned serpent coils under a huge feathered wing. From 1915 the frieze belonged to the industrialist August Lederer and his wife Serena, major Klimt collectors. In 1938 the Nazi regime took it from the family, who were Jewish. After the war it went back to their son Erich in Geneva, but Austria would not allow it to leave the country, and in 1972 he sold it to the state. Lederer heirs asked for its return in 2013, and in 2015 Austria's restitution advisory board recommended against it.