The Dancer

This started as a memorial. In 1912 the Vienna businessman Alexander Munk and his wife asked Gustav Klimt to paint their daughter Ria, who had taken her own life the year before. Klimt's first version showed her on her deathbed and the grieving family refused it. He tried again, and what survives here is a reworking of that second attempt, so thoroughly changed that the dead young woman became simply the Dancer, set against a dense screen of anemones and mosaic-like flowers. Look at the lower third and you can see the picture was never finished. Klimt's charcoal underdrawing sits bare on the canvas, left exactly as it stood in his studio when he died of a stroke early in 1918.