Gustav Klimt's Hope

A few months ago we looked at the work Embrace by the famous painter Gustav Klimt, who lived in Vienna between 1862 and 1918. Woman, in all her aspects, was a subject the artist returned to often, and among his works are two paintings depicting women in advanced pregnancy. Both works, created in 1903 and 1907 respectively, are titled Hope and offer two completely different visions of impending motherhood.

Hope I (1903)

Even the arrangement of the figures in the 1903 painting, Hope I — a rectangular work 186 cm tall and 67 cm wide — stirs a sense of unease in the viewer. Hope is depicted allegorically as a young pregnant woman, completely undressed. She is positioned on the left side of the canvas (to the viewer's right) and seems trapped in that position. The woman's nudity evidently alludes to the intimate encounter from which the body she now carries within her arose. In traditional iconography, the body of a pregnant woman is soft and welcoming, full-figured and tender; her gaze and smile bear witness to an intimate, loving dialogue between mother and child, so much so that viewers often feel like intruders on the scene unfolding before them. In this painting by Klimt, the traditional iconographic approach is overturned, and none of this is present: the woman has an unhealthy thinness and pallor; beneath a mass of red hair, her face appears bony, her cheekbones prominent, her eyes ringed, her lips pressed shut. Her breasts appear slightly sagging and small, lacking the milk needed to nourish the unborn child; her arms and legs are thin. Dominating everything is a disproportionately prominent belly, emphasized by the profile position, almost detached from the rest of the body.

The woman's arms, folded beneath her breasts, are not in the usual pose of expectant mothers, who rest their hands on their belly in a spontaneous gesture of affectionate caress toward the unborn child, but instead suggest a gesture of self-protection and defense against something other than herself. It is as if the woman were ill at ease, and indeed her head is turned toward the viewer, with a vaguely questioning expression in her pale blue eyes. The image conveys no tenderness, but appears pervaded by a sense of astonishment, perhaps almost resentment at what is happening, and in any case by great unease, betrayed by the irregularities of the body, the pose, and the gaze. One would hardly think to call this woman an expectant mother. In the upper part of the painting three presences hover — female faces, more or less deformed — and a skull at the level of the woman's red mass of hair. The critic Ludwig Hevesi, who knew Klimt personally and wrote extensively about him, called these figures «demons of life»: dark threats to the unborn child's life, yet not entirely foreign to the mother herself, who, ambiguously, wears a crown of white flowers — a symbol of purity — atop her flame-red hair, typical of Klimt's sensual, provocative siren-women, whose main aim is to arouse desire and satisfy carnal love.

These grim figures could represent the Fates, deities of classical mythology, waiting to begin weaving the thread of the unborn child's life — a life one senses will not be easy, not one of joy, but full of anxiety and unease. The three faces may also depict the three ages of woman, a theme present in many of Klimt's paintings. The woman shows no anxious concern for the unborn child, while what seems to be awaiting the baby's birth is instead a monster hooded in black, with a serpent's tail, occupying the central part of the painting, snaring the mother's ankles in a loop and reaching a menacing clawed paw toward her belly. On the monster's head, too, the artist places a mysterious row of small white flowers: a metamorphosis, an omen of the woman's transformation? Quite curiously, this figure seems to anticipate by a few years Jung's archetype of the Great Mother (1912): on one hand the positive pole of femininity, embodying fertility, nourishment, protection (the good mother); on the other the negative pole — the abyss, the secret, the dark, the world of the dead, that which seduces, devours, poisons (the bad mother) — a symbol of unease and of the shadows of the unconscious. The skull suspended above the woman's head, tilted at the same angle as she is, suggests a premonition of that death which is an inseparable part of life itself.

Klimt was known for his deep knowledge and frequent use of archaic languages: many critics explain the recurring geometric signs in his decorations as a reference to prehistoric images and languages that, evidently, express the eternal, primordial feeling underlying human nature. Many of these signs appear in this work, and probably form a link to worlds removed from consciousness, tied to the most primal and fearful experiences of life that inevitably resurface in the mind during pregnancy.

Klimt knew that respectable Vienna would hardly accept such a scandalous and unsettling subject, and the work Hope I was exhibited to the public only six years after it was created, on the occasion of a major exhibition that brought together many artists and is considered crucial in the history of modern art in Vienna: the event coincided with the celebrations for the sixtieth anniversary of the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph. The work nonetheless continued to cause a stir and scandal for a long time, and it is said that the first owner of Hope I kept it covered for some time after purchasing it.

Hope II (1907)

Four years later, in 1907, Klimt returned to the theme with Hope II, subtitled Vision, Fertility, Legend, offering a perception of motherhood that is the complete opposite of the earlier work. The canvas is square in format, typical of the artist's mature years, as is the dotted gold background, which erases the perception of real physical space and places the figure in a «cosmic» setting — one that would also be used in the famous Kiss from the same period. The mother figure is centrally positioned, as in most classical works, such as Van Eyck's Madonna discussed in another article. Unlike classical iconography, the figure is shown in profile, but here the protagonist can truly be called a «mother» in the fullest sense of the word. This time her gaze is lowered toward her belly, her breasts bare and full. The vision includes only the mother and the child developing in her womb; the viewer remains outside the scene and is not called into question. The woman's right hand is slightly raised, almost as if marking, with the gesture, the words of a silent dialogue between mother and child.

The golden background, the bright colors, the mother's gentle and meditative demeanor are as far removed as possible from the first version of this theme. When the eye moves down to the lower part of the painting, it does in fact discover elements that recall the 1903 work: among the arabesques of her dress, three female figures in an attitude of sorrowful prayer, heads bowed, eyes closed, hands raised perhaps to cover their faces. But this is a measured grief, not the desperate omen of disaster. Moving up over the mother's belly, once again a suspended skull can be found, barely resting there, so to speak, reduced to pure decoration yet still very evident — perhaps, once again, an awareness of death, born together with life. The figure, built largely from an interlocking of tiles with stylized floral motifs, does not lose its solidity, and above all its psychological dimension of solemn meditation.