The Music I

Munich's Glaspalast was a vast glass-and-iron hall, put up in 1854 for an industrial fair, and by 1901 it housed the city's huge annual art exhibition. Klimt showed this small canvas there that year, and the Bavarian state collections bought it directly from him. It has stayed in Munich ever since.

He had painted it in 1895. A young woman in a heavy dark dress bends over a golden kithara, the stringed instrument of ancient Greece. At the far left a stone mask of Silenus, the old drunken companion of the god Dionysus, looks out from behind her skirt, and on the right stands a sphinx. Klimt painted the gold of the instrument with gold bronze, a metallic powder mixed into the oil. Three years later he took up the same subject again on a much bigger canvas. The Munich picture is small by comparison, its painted area only about 28 by 36 centimetres.