Cieco

In 1896 Klimt was still Vienna's safest choice for a grand ceiling. He and his brother had decorated the Burgtheater and the staircase of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and the city's establishment paid well for it. This head of an old blind man comes from that same year and looks nothing like that work. The paint is thick and dark, the face lit hard from one side so that half of it drops away into brown, and it has never been settled whether it was a commission or something he did for himself. Two years later he hung it in the first exhibition of the Secession, the breakaway society he helped found in the meantime, and it was reproduced in their magazine Ver Sacrum. The canvas is small, about 66 by 53 centimetres. It passed through a Vienna auction room in 1917 and another in 1932 before Rudolf Leopold bought it.