Death and Life by Klimt

 Death and Life - 1915

Gustav Klimt (1862 ~ 1918)

Oil on canvas (180 x 200 cm)

Leopold Museum, Vienna, Austria

is an oil on canvas painting by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt. The painting was started in 1908 and completed in 1915. It is created in an Art Nouveau (Modern) style by use of allegorical painting genre during Golden phase. The painting measures 178 by 198 centimeters and is now housed at the Leopold Museum in Vienna. This is one of Klimt's central themes, central also to his time and to his contemporaries among them Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele. Klimt makes of it a modern dance of death, but unlike Schiele, he introduces a note of hope and reconciliation, instead of feeling threatened by the figure of death, his human beings seem to disregard it. The imagination of the artist is focused no longer on physical union, but rather on the expectation that precedes it. Perhaps this new found serenity is rooted in Klimt's own awareness of aging and closeness to death. But before the moment came when he chose to depict nothing more than moments of intense pleasure or miraculous beauty and youth.