The Dancer Under Klimt Analysis

The Dancer (Fig. 1) is a portraiture made by Gustav Klimt in 1916-17. Gustav Klimt was the central figure of Vienna’s Golden Age. He was extremely famous for his distinctive ability to capture the beauty of female. A bare-breasted young woman appears in full length and life size at the center of the picture with a full-frontal pose before an Oriental wallpaper. Her cheeks have a faint rose tinge to them. The elongated horizontal shape of her eyes gives a distinctly Asian look. Her wildly colorful patterned dress is exuberant, almost garish, and similarly mirrors the surrounding elements of the painting, particularly the floral arrangements that frame her. The luminous orange table in the front of the woman, at the same time, echoes with the

Therefore, she decided to have a portrait to commemorate the early death of her beautiful daughter in the same year. Serena Lederer was Aranka’s sister, also was one of Klimt’s main patrons, who owned the most works of Klimt collections. Moreover, Gustav Klimt was one of the most sought-after portraitists in Vienna. It was possible that Aranka persuaded her sister, Serena, to commission a posthumous portrait of Ria Munk. It was also around this period, posthumous portraitures, death masks, and other such things were popular in many places around the turn of the twentieth century and grown to be an important role in the formation of a Viennese way of considering

2), the first one was painted immediately after Ria’s death in 1912. Klimt created a half-length portrait giving an impression that the woman surrounded with flowers was only falling asleep. However, Aranka rejected this painting because of the aura of serenity and peace shrouded her daughter. Instead, a portrait that could recreate and represent the spirit and vitality she remembered about her daughter was in demand. Since the first commissioned portraiture did meet the family’s approval, Klimt struggled with the charge. He wrote to his friend Emilie Floge in 1913 that he was having trouble and that “it 's not coming along! Can 't make it look like her.” He once again wrote to Emilie Floge talking about his slow progress. Several years later, Klimt painted a full length and life size portrait of Ria Munk in 1916-17. And then, he altered it into The Dancer (Fig. 1), since the painting that The Dancer was painted over had been rejected again. Scholars generally think that The Dancer could not be the one Klimt presented to her heartbroken parents, because of the uncontrollable eroticism. The figure of the second portrait is similar to Klimt’s most representations of Viennese femme fatale, who is mysterious and seductive. In addition, Klimt privately owned the amended and unfinished version of Ria at his studio. The final version of Ria Munk’s portrait, Portrait of Ria Munk III (Fig. 3), was left unfinished when Klimt died in 1918. The upper