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Medicine | Gustav Klimt | 1901

Medicine | Gustav Klimt | 1901

€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 Medicine (Medizin) — second 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 900-1907 (the second of the three Faculty Paintings commissioned in 1894 by the Austrian Ministry of Education for the ceiling of the University of Vienna's Great Hall. Klimt first exhibited Medicine in unfinished state at the Tenth Vienna Secession exhibition in March 1901, where it provoked an even greater scandal than Philosophy had the previous year — 87 faculty members signed a petition against the cycle, and the painting was attacked in a medical journal for its lack of allegorical homage to the science of healing and for its explicit female nudity. Rather than glorifying medicine, the composition shows on the right a vertical column of intertwined naked human bodies — a river of life flowing from birth to death, with a skeleton of Death visible at the top right — while on the left a single nude female figure floats free of the stream, suspended in space. At the foot of the composition stands the painting's only "medical" figure: Hygieia, the daughter of Aesculapius and goddess of health, frontally facing, robed in red and gold, holding the Aesculapian serpent and the Cup of Lethe — and conspicuously turning her back on suffering humanity, the most provocative element of the entire cycle. After the Ministry refused to install the paintings in the Great Hall, Klimt resigned the commission in 1905 and repaid his 30,000-crown advance with the support of August Lederer. Provenance: Klimt; sold to Koloman Moser between 1910 and 1912; sold by the Moser family in 1919; acquired through patrons by the Österreichische Galerie / Belvedere, Vienna; confiscated by the Nazis after the 1938 Anschluss; transferred to Schloss Immendorf for safekeeping in 1944; destroyed there the following May)
  • Technique/Medium Oil on canvas (with gold and silver leaf accents in the figure of Hygieia, foreshadowing Klimt's Golden Phase)
  • Original dimensions 430 x 300 cm (same monumental vertical format as Philosophy and Jurisprudence)
  • Collection/Museum Destroyed (burned by retreating SS forces in the fire at Schloss Immendorf, Lower Austria, on 8 May 1945, along with Klimt's other two Faculty Paintings Philosophy and Jurisprudence; survives only through black-and-white documentary photographs, a single partial colour photograph of the figure of Hygieia, and preparatory sketches and oil studies)

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