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Jurisprudence | Gustav Klimt | 1903

Jurisprudence | 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)
  • 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 (the third and final painting of the cycle that Klimt and his early collaborator Franz Matsch had been commissioned in 1894 by the Austrian Ministry of Education to paint for the ceiling of the University of Vienna's Great Hall, with the three Faculty Paintings allegorising the disciplines of Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence; the central Theology panel was assigned to Matsch. Klimt first completed Jurisprudence in 1903 and exhibited it at the Eighteenth Secession exhibition that same year — together with Philosophy and Medicine, the only occasion on which the three Faculty Paintings were shown together in their final state — and continued to revise it lightly until 1907. The composition departs entirely from the conventional allegory of triumphant justice. In the lower zone, a haggard, naked condemned man — emaciated, hunched, his head sunk into his shoulders — is engulfed by a great squamous octopus-like sea monster and embraced by three siren-like female Furies, the writhing forces of guilt, vengeance and the unconscious. 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 is Klimt's biting critique of the inadequacy of human judgement and punishment. As with the other Faculty Paintings, the work was attacked as "pornographic" and "perverted excess." After 87 university faculty signed a petition against the cycle and the Ministry refused to install the paintings in the Great Hall, Klimt resigned the commission in 1905 — reportedly threatening the Ministry's removal staff with a shotgun to keep the canvases — and repaid the 30,000-crown advance with the support of his patron August Lederer. Provenance after the artist: Klimt; sold to Koloman Moser between 1910 and 1912; sold by the Moser family in 1919; acquired by the industrialist August Lederer, who already owned Philosophy; confiscated by the Nazis from the Lederer family after the 1938 Anschluss; transferred for safekeeping to Schloss Immendorf in 1944, where it was burned the following May)
  • Technique/Medium Oil on canvas (with gold and metal leaf in the upper register, characteristic of Klimt's Golden Phase)
  • Original dimensions 430 x 300 cm (the same large vertical format as Philosophy and Medicine)
  • 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, preparatory color sketches, a single partial color photograph, and related drawings)

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