Women Friends

Women Friends (1916–17) continues Klimt's lifelong exploration of female intimacy and erotic charge in same-sex subjects, a theme that runs from the early Silverfishes (1899) through Water Serpents I and II (1904–07) to the late figure compositions. The subject of two women in close physical proximity — their relationship simultaneously tender and charged — was central to Klimt's personal and artistic obsession with female sexuality. Klimt's studio on the Josefstädter Strasse in Vienna was famously a space where women posed freely, and his personal relationships with multiple women simultaneously were well known in Viennese society. By 1916 the ornamental language of the Golden Phase had been modified but not abandoned: the backgrounds of late figure compositions like this one retain decorative complexity while the figures themselves are treated with increased painterly freedom. The work connects to the broader Viennese avant-garde's preoccupation with desire, the unconscious, and the erotic — concerns shared with Freud's analytic practice and Schnitzler's literary explorations of bourgeois sexuality.

Oil on canvas with late Klimt technique: figures modelled in warm, layered glazes set against a decorative background combining East Asian textile motifs with Klimt's own ornamental vocabulary. The physical proximity of the two figures is reinforced compositionally by the way their forms overlap and their contours merge, making individuation visually difficult.