Goldfish

Goldfish was Klimt's deliberately provocative response to critics of the Viennese Secession who had attacked his University ceiling paintings as immoral and obscene. The original title was reportedly 'To my Critics,' and the painting depicts a voluptuous nude woman seen from behind, directing a pointed gesture over her shoulder toward the viewer. Goldfish swarm around the figure in the underwater space that was becoming one of Klimt's characteristic fantasy environments — a realm of sensuous dissolution where human and aquatic life intermingle. The Kunstmuseum Solothurn holds this as one of Klimt's most openly defiant and sardonic works from a period of sustained controversy.

Klimt constructs an aquatic environment of extraordinary richness, with the nude figure and the goldfish sharing an ambiguous spatial zone that hovers between water and dream. The figure is rendered with characteristic contrast between warmly modeled flesh and the decorative, almost abstract treatment of her hair and the surrounding aquatic elements.