Pale Face

1903 was the year Klimt's public career came apart. The ceiling paintings he had made for the University of Vienna were being denounced by professors and argued over in parliament. In the same year he painted this, a woman in black against an almost black ground, her eyes closed, only the face and the pink of the mouth taking any light. The one hint of a room is a faint checkerboard at the upper right, the kind of square grid the Vienna designers around him were using on everything, and the Wiener Werkstatte was founded that year. The sitter has never been named, though her clothes place her in the wealthy Viennese middle class. The flattened silhouette and the shut eyes owe something to the Dutch painter Jan Toorop, whose work Klimt had seen at the Secession.