Портрет Эмилии Флёге

Vienna, 1902. Emilie Flöge was 28, and more than the woman at Klimt's side for most of his life; she ran one of the city's leading fashion houses with her sisters. The long robe she wears here is one of her own designs, a loose reform dress worn without a corset, patterned in blue, purple and gold. That was a quiet statement in itself, at a moment when respectable Viennese women were still laced tightly in. Klimt covers nearly the whole surface with the ornament he was moving toward in these years, so the body almost dissolves into pattern and only the face and hands stay solid. When it was shown at the Secession in 1903 it struck viewers as startlingly modern. Klimt and Flöge never married, and stayed close to the end.