Water Serpents II

Klimt began this long, dreamlike panel of floating women around 1904 and reworked it until about 1907, at the height of his gold period in Vienna, tuning the surface with gold and silver until the bodies seem to drift underwater. Its later history is a story of its own. The painting belonged to Jenny Steiner, a Viennese sugar-industry heiress, until 1938, when the Nazi regime seized it after the annexation of Austria and she fled abroad. It ended up with the film director Gustav Ucicky, rumoured to be one of Klimt's illegitimate children, and then disappeared from public view for decades. Only in 2012 did it resurface, when Ucicky's widow and the heirs of Jenny Steiner reached a settlement over who it truly belonged to.