Goldfish

Goldfish is an oil on canvas painted by Gustav Klimt in 1901 and 1902, one of his allegorical compositions devoted to water nymphs. It belongs to a group of works in which the painter explored water as a setting for seductive and dangerous beings, an idea drawn from Belgian Symbolists such as Xavier Mellery and Jan Toorop, who had shown otherworldly figures in spaces that seem to escape gravity. The undines, water nymphs of rivers and lakes in Germanic folklore, related to the Greek naiads and to sirens, appear here as four naked, smiling women moving among long, rippling hair. Two of them peer in from the edges of the picture, another drifts beside a large golden fish in the dark depths, and the main figure, crouching in the foreground, turns to look provocatively at the viewer. The tall, narrow format recalls the vertical arrangement of figures in the University paintings, so the work can be read as a more intimate variant of that project.

The painting emerged in the middle of a scandal. Klimt had received a state commission for the ceremonial hall of the University of Vienna, but his works Philosophy and Jurisprudence departed from what was expected and met harsh criticism from the public and the press. The artist, reserved and wary of publicity, chose to answer through painting. According to tradition, he considered calling the work To My Critics, though friends dissuaded him. The final title, Goldfish, refers to a golden subspecies of the ide, but its allusive meaning was widely understood: the writer Felix Salten recalled that Klimt described the picture as a hieroglyph showing a convex rear turned toward the viewer, a gesture of contempt toward his detractors. It was first shown at the XIII Exhibition of the Vienna Secession in 1902.

The work matters because it brings together several traits of Klimt's maturity: the pursuit of a symbolic world detached from everyday reality, the rippling linear treatment of hair, a vertical composition without conventional depth, and the irony of a pictorial reply to a public controversy.

Painter

Gustav Klimt

Date

1902

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

181 × 67 cm

Museum

Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Solothurn

Depicts

mooning, nymph

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