Portrait of Johanna Staude

By 1917 Vienna was in the fourth year of a war that was starving it, and Klimt was painting a very modern kind of woman. Johanna Staude was a language teacher, divorced, sitting in a boldly patterned blouse whose fabric, a leaf design called Blätter, came from the Wiener Werkstätte, the city's own design workshop. Klimt set her against a flat orange ground to make the blue of the cloth ring out, and gave her a short, fashionable haircut and a direct, level stare. Look closely at the mouth and you can see the picture was never quite finished. Klimt had a stroke early in 1918 and died that February, at 55, leaving this and several other portraits at exactly the stage his brush had reached.