Hope

Gustav Klimt's 'Hope' (1903) depicts a pregnant woman in a composition that placed the most elemental of human experiences within the context of the symbolic imagery and biological forces that Klimt associated with the human condition. His engagement with the pregnant female figure was characteristically ambivalent — the hope of new life surrounded by the skulls and shadowy presences that suggested the simultaneous presence of death within the life-generating process. The work was too controversial for public exhibition when first painted, its frank engagement with the pregnant body and its symbolic attendants disturbing conventional taste.

Klimt renders the pregnant woman with his characteristic combination of the specific and the symbolic — the woman's body depicted with biological frankness while the surrounding decorative elements and symbolic figures create the philosophical context of the composition. His handling of the decorative elements (the flattened, patterned background, the symbolic figures surrounding the central woman) demonstrates his mature decorative-symbolic style at its most concentrated. The tension between the realist treatment of the body and the symbolic treatment of the surrounding elements creates the composition's distinctive character.