Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl

Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl (1917–18) is another of Klimt's final unfinished canvases, begun in the last year of his life. Amalie Zuckerkandl was the daughter-in-law of Bertha Zuckerkandl, the prominent Viennese journalist and Secession advocate whose salon was a central gathering place for the Viennese avant-garde, including Klimt, Mahler, and Freud. The commission thus connected Klimt directly to the social and intellectual network that had sustained the Secession project. The portrait's unfinished state — the face developed, the clothing and background sketched or absent — mirrors the incompletion of Adam and Eva, The Bride, and the Staude portrait from the same period. The Belvedere holds all of these final works, and together they constitute a meditation on creative process and mortality. Amalie Zuckerkandl survived the war, but her subsequent fate under National Socialism was tragic — making this unfinished portrait a historical document of a Vienna about to be catastrophically destroyed.

Canvas in an early stage of development: the face and some areas of clothing are sketched in paint while broad areas remain at ground or underdrawing stage. Klimt's characteristic division between precise face rendering and decorative surround is evident even at this preparatory stage, with the face clearly more developed than the surrounding field.