Woman With a Fan

Woman With a Fan (c. 1917–18) is among the last completed paintings by Klimt, finished or nearly so at the time of his death in February 1918. It represents the culmination of his synthesis of Western portraiture with East Asian decorative traditions, the fan being a motif that bridges both cultural contexts — simultaneously the fashionable accessory of the Viennese bourgeoisie and an object deeply associated with Japanese visual culture. Klimt owned a significant collection of Japanese woodblock prints, Chinese objects, and East Asian garments, and his studio was decorated with these works which served as direct visual sources for his late paintings. The background of birds and flowers in this work has been linked to specific East Asian textile and screen-painting conventions. The female figure herself is semi-anonymous, as in several of Klimt's late figure paintings: the identity of the sitter, if there is one, is subsumed beneath the ornamental totality. The work exemplifies Klimt's mature conviction — developed alongside the Wiener Werkstätte's integrative aesthetic — that the boundary between fine and applied art, between the painted figure and the decorative field, was artificial and worth dissolving.

Oil on canvas with an extraordinary density of patterning in the background, executed in multiple glazed layers. The fan is painted with meticulous attention to its lacquerwork surface — distinguishable from the surrounding textile patterns by a different paint handling — while the figure's face emerges from the ornamental complexity with concentrated luminosity.