Death and Life puts a skeleton beside a heap of sleepers of every age, and the meaning lies in that closeness: life is a cycle, and Death is part of it from the start. The sleepers do not resist him. The Austrian painter Gustav Klimt painted it in 1910 and repainted it until 1917, and the changes turned a Death with a bowed head into one who stares at the living.
On the left stands a skeleton in a robe of crosses. On the right lies a heap of sleeping people: a baby, a mother, a couple, an old woman. Almost nothing separates them. The canvas, about two meters on each side, hangs in the Leopold Museum in Vienna.
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Klimt sketched it in 1908, but the Death and Life that hangs in Vienna is not the one the public first saw. In March 1911 he traveled to Rome for the International Art Exhibition, where the Austrian pavilion showed eight of his paintings and four drawings. One was a canvas then called simply Death, and Klimt came home with a prize.
That canvas no longer exists. Klimt took it back into the studio and painted over it, again and again. The version the visitors saw in Rome survives only in a photograph and a color lithograph.
I find that stranger than any reading of the skeleton. The visitors of 1911 saw a picture that Klimt later took apart, and no one can say for certain which of his paintings the prize rewarded.
The first version, shown in Rome
The Austrian pavilion was designed by the Viennese architect Josef Hoffmann, and the exhibition marked fifty years since the unification of Italy. Klimt stayed in Rome in late March, at the Grand Hotel de Russie.
The prize itself is recorded both as a gold medal and as a money prize of 10,000 lire.
The photograph, a black and white print by the Viennese photographer Moriz Nähr, comes from Klimt's estate. Exhibition views of Rome and Dresden add to it, along with a lithograph in the portfolio published by the Vienna gallery Miethke and a color print in the magazine Kunst für alle in autumn 1913.
In that first version Death stood alone on the left with his head bowed. On the right, life was stacked in three parts: a mother and child, an old woman, a couple in an embrace. After the show in Dresden the next year, Klimt began to paint over it, and Death would end up with a club in his hand.
What You'll Discover
How long Klimt kept repainting it.
The girl who sees Death.
Why Death wears a robe of crosses.
Who owned the canvas before the museum.