Ritratto di Amalie Zuckerkandl

Klimt died in early 1918 with this portrait still unfinished, and that is why you can read it almost like a diagram. The face and shoulders are brought to a high finish while the dress and the vivid green ground behind her fall away into bare canvas and pencil lines, the scaffolding a Klimt portrait usually hides. The sitter was Amalie Zuckerkandl, a well-known figure in Viennese society, married into a family close to the city's medical and artistic circles. What the calm picture cannot tell you is what came after. Amalie was Jewish, and in 1942 she was deported and murdered at the Belzec camp in occupied Poland. Ownership of the painting was disputed for years, and Austria's courts ultimately let the Belvedere keep it.