Judith I

Gustav Klimt's 'Judith I' (1901) is one of his most celebrated and controversial works — the biblical heroine who decapitated the Assyrian general Holofernes depicted not as the conventionally heroic defender of her people but as a figure of dangerous, sexually charged femininity whose half-lidded expression suggested as much pleasure as resolve. Klimt's Judith embodied his broader engagement with the femme fatale archetype — the Woman as a figure of elemental power, desire, and destruction — that ran through his mature work and connected him to the broader Symbolist and Decadent cultural current of fin-de-siècle Europe.

Klimt renders Judith with his characteristic combination of the illusionistic and the decorative — the face and body modeled with psychological immediacy and sensuous detail while the background and accessory elements (the gold frame, Holofernes's head) dissolve into the flat, patterned gold that was his signature decorative element. His gold-leaf application and the rich ornamental patterns create a visual world that oscillated between the icon and the erotic, the sacred and the profane.