Entwurf zu einem Vorhang des Stadttheaters Karlsbad

In the mid-1880s Karlsbad, the Bohemian spa town now called Karlovy Vary, was building a new municipal theatre, and its decoration went to Gustav Klimt, his brother Ernst and their partner Franz Matsch. This small oil sketch, which the Belvedere gives to Gustav and dates around 1884 or 1885, is his design for the stage curtain. His model was Hans Makart, the most celebrated painter in Vienna, who had designed two large curtains for its stages in the early 1870s. Like Makart, Klimt painted the stage opening too, with red drapery at the sides that belonged to the auditorium and not to the painted cloth. Inside that frame a festive crowd of women, putti and costumed figures moves through a garden, a procession the museum cannot tie to any known story. The theatre opened on 15 May 1886 with Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, and the finished curtain, a tribute to poetry, is still there.