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Jurisprudence (Colorized) | Gustav Klimt | 1903

Jurisprudence (Colorized) | Gustav Klimt | 1903

€32,95
€32,95
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About the artwork:

Gustav Klimt’s Faculty Paintings—Philosophy (1900), Medicine (1901), and Jurisprudence (1903)—form one of the most controversial trilogies in modern art. Originally commissioned for the University of Vienna, these monumental works shocked the public with their dark symbolism, fragmented bodies, and unsettling depictions of human suffering. Philosophy dissolves humanity into a cosmic swirl, Medicine confronts the fragility of life through a towering column of naked figures, and Jurisprudence shows humanity trapped and judged by inescapable forces. Their radical style and pessimistic worldview caused such outrage that the university rejected them, and the paintings were later destroyed in 1945—surviving today only through photographs that reveal how far Klimt was willing to push both art and society.

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  • Title Jurisprudence (Jurisprudenz) — third of the University of Vienna Ceiling Paintings / Faculty Paintings (Fakultätsbilder); the qualifier "Colorized" refers to a modern digital reconstruction of the destroyed canvas based on the surviving partial colour photograph and preparatory material
  • Artist Gustav Klimt (Austrian Symbolist; co-founder and first president of the Vienna Secession 1897; Baumgarten near Vienna, 14 July 1862 - Vienna, 6 February 1918)
  • Year of creation 1903-1907 (Jurisprudence is the third and final painting of the cycle commissioned in 1894 by the Austrian Ministry of Education from Klimt and Franz Matsch for the ceiling of the University of Vienna's Great Hall, alongside Philosophy [first shown 1900] and Medicine [first shown 1901]. Klimt first completed Jurisprudence in 1903 and exhibited the canvas at the Eighteenth Secession exhibition that same year; he then continued to revise it lightly until 1907, when the final state was definitively settled. The composition departs entirely from the conventional allegory of triumphant justice that the university expected. In the foreground, a haggard, naked condemned man — bowed, head sunk into his torso — is engulfed and embraced by three female Furies and a great squamous octopus-like sea monster, the writhing forces of guilt and the unconscious, while above and behind, separated by a vast spatial gulf in a flat, gold-and-mosaic upper register, the three classical goddesses of Truth [Veritas], Justice [Justitia], and Law [Lex] look on impassively. The deliberate distance between the small high goddesses and the much larger tortured prisoner illustrates Klimt's biting critique of the inadequacy of human judgement and punishment. As with Philosophy and Medicine, the painting was attacked for "pornography" and "perverted excess." It belonged successively to Klimt himself, then to his Secession colleague Koloman Moser, who acquired it between 1910 and 1912; sold by the Moser family in 1919; later in the collection of the Jewish industrialist August Lederer, who also owned Philosophy; seized by the Nazis after the 1938 Anschluss; transferred for safekeeping to Schloss Immendorf in 1944, where it was burned the following May)
  • Technique/Medium Oil on canvas
  • Original dimensions 430 x 300 cm (the same large vertical format as the other two Faculty Paintings)
  • Collection/Museum Destroyed (the painting was burned by retreating SS forces in the fire at Schloss Immendorf in Lower Austria on 8 May 1945, along with Klimt's other two Faculty Paintings, Philosophy and Medicine; the work survives only through black-and-white documentary photographs, color sketches, preparatory studies, and a single partial colour photograph that has been the basis for recent digital colorized reconstructions — including those produced by Google Arts & Culture in 2021 and earlier scholarly projects)

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