Women Friends

We only know this painting from old photographs. It showed two women, one nude and one wrapped in a flowing red robe patterned with Chinese phoenixes, looking straight out at us. Klimt finished it around 1916 for the Lederer family, a Viennese Jewish couple who owned more of his work than anyone else. To protect it during the Second World War, their collection was moved to Schloss Immendorf, a castle north of Vienna. In May 1945, as the war ended, retreating SS troops set the castle on fire and it burned for days. More than a dozen Klimt paintings went with it, this one among them. The red still glows in the few surviving colour plates.