Judith II

Judith II, also known as Salome, was painted in 1909 and is Klimt's second major treatment of the Old Testament heroine who decapitated the Assyrian general Holofernes. Where the celebrated Judith I of 1901 portrayed the moment of erotic aftermath with the severed head clutched beneath the heroine's partially bared breast, Judith II shows the figure in ecstatic motion, her claw-like hands gripping the head. The painting was exhibited at the 1909 Venice Biennale and acquired by the Galleria Internazionale d'Arte Moderna in the Ca' Pesaro. The Judith subject was a central motif of Symbolist misogyny — the sexually empowered femme fatale who destroys the male — but Klimt's treatment consistently presented the figure with a psychological complexity that complicates simple reductive readings. By 1909 Klimt's formal language had shifted from the strict gold-and-ornament system of his Golden Phase toward looser, more gestural handling with increasingly expressionistic qualities. The vertical format and the figure cropped at the upper edge create an energetic, upward-thrusting composition entirely different from the horizontal repose of Judith I. The painting has sometimes been misidentified as Salome, a confusion that reflects the interchangeability of the femme fatale type in Symbolist iconography.

The figure's face and upper body are rendered in Klimt's mature fluid technique, with warm flesh tones and precise facial modelling, while the lower body and dress dissolve into an increasingly schematic and ornamental handling. The claw-like fingers gripping the severed head are painted with particular expressionistic energy.