The Hostile Powers, the Titan Typhoeus, the Three Gorgons

Klimt's 'The Hostile Powers: The Titan Typhoeus and the Three Gorgons' (1902) was painted as part of the Beethoven Frieze — one of the most important works of Viennese Secession art — created for the Fourteenth Vienna Secession Exhibition. The exhibition centred on Max Klinger's monumental sculpture of Beethoven, and Klimt's frieze illustrated the Ninth Symphony's journey of the soul through suffering toward joy. The Hostile Powers section depicting Typhoeus and the Gorgons represented the obstacles confronting the questing hero. The frieze, painted directly on the walls of the temporary exhibition space, was intended for destruction after the show but was preserved and is now housed in the Secession Building.

Klimt uses his characteristic combination of mosaic-like gold and decorative patterning with more conventionally painted flesh, creating a formal tension between flat ornament and modelled figuration. The Gorgon figures are rendered with the serpentine, sinuous line of the Jugendstil tradition applied to nightmarish subject matter. The spatial organisation is deliberately non-illusionistic, the figures arrayed across the surface as emblematic presences.