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James Lucas
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Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
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On one side stands Death, alone, a hunched skeleton wrapped in a dark cloak covered in crosses.
On the other, separated from him by nothing but empty space, floats Life: a great tangle of sleeping bodies, a mother holding her baby, a young couple wrapped in each other’s arms, an old woman with her head bowed, all wrapped in a blanket of flowers and colorful circles.
Gustav Klimt began sketching Death and Life in 1908 and started painting it in 1910, when he was 48. When it was first shown in Rome the following year, under the simple title Death, it won a gold medal, and Klimt himself called it his most important figurative work.
And yet he was never fully satisfied with it: he kept going back to it for years, so persistently that traces of his paint can still be seen on the original frame, and in 1915, in the middle of the First World War, he changed it profoundly. The golden background of his most famous period disappeared under a cold gray, and Death changed too. In the first version, he was an almost dignified figure, bowing his head, in the final one, he grins, raises a small club, and gets ready to strike.
But the detail that makes the painting unforgettable is the one most people miss…
Look at the girl on the far left of the group of the living: hers are the only eyes wide open. She has seen him. Her hands are pressed to her chest in fear, while everyone around her drifts on in a dream, their eyes closed, unaware of the figure watching them from the dark.
Klimt died in 1918, just a few years after he finished reworking it, and the longer you look at that girl, the more you realize that seeing the truth comes at a price: she is the only one who knows what’s coming, but also the only one who has stopped living, because to be afraid of Death all the time means no longer dreaming, loving, or holding the people beside you. The others close their eyes because they’re busy with life, which is the one thing Death will never manage to take from all of us at once. As the Leopold Museum, where the painting hangs, puts it, Death may take individuals, but life itself, "humanity as a whole, will always elude his grasp."
On the other, separated from him by nothing but empty space, floats Life: a great tangle of sleeping bodies, a mother holding her baby, a young couple wrapped in each other’s arms, an old woman with her head bowed, all wrapped in a blanket of flowers and colorful circles.
Gustav Klimt began sketching Death and Life in 1908 and started painting it in 1910, when he was 48. When it was first shown in Rome the following year, under the simple title Death, it won a gold medal, and Klimt himself called it his most important figurative work.
And yet he was never fully satisfied with it: he kept going back to it for years, so persistently that traces of his paint can still be seen on the original frame, and in 1915, in the middle of the First World War, he changed it profoundly. The golden background of his most famous period disappeared under a cold gray, and Death changed too. In the first version, he was an almost dignified figure, bowing his head, in the final one, he grins, raises a small club, and gets ready to strike.
But the detail that makes the painting unforgettable is the one most people miss…
Look at the girl on the far left of the group of the living: hers are the only eyes wide open. She has seen him. Her hands are pressed to her chest in fear, while everyone around her drifts on in a dream, their eyes closed, unaware of the figure watching them from the dark.
Klimt died in 1918, just a few years after he finished reworking it, and the longer you look at that girl, the more you realize that seeing the truth comes at a price: she is the only one who knows what’s coming, but also the only one who has stopped living, because to be afraid of Death all the time means no longer dreaming, loving, or holding the people beside you. The others close their eyes because they’re busy with life, which is the one thing Death will never manage to take from all of us at once. As the Leopold Museum, where the painting hangs, puts it, Death may take individuals, but life itself, "humanity as a whole, will always elude his grasp."
This is real footage of Jerusalem from 129 years ago
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