Act of a Lady and Young Girl Lying Down - From Fuenfundzwanzig Handzeichnungen By Gustav Klimt, 1919. Fuenfundzwanzig Handzeichnungen contains twenty-five monochrome and two-color collotypes after drawings by Klimt. It is as remarkable an achievement in collotype printing as the monumental Das Werk Gustav Klimts. Yet because the 1919 portfolio is based on drawings, its aesthetic achievement lies in capturing the variations of line that characterize Klimt’s drawing style between 1898 and 1917. Klimt’s drawings of women are suffused with sexuality, although it is often unclear where the boundary between observation and identification lies.This tension between self-presentation and self-absorption parallels the alternating roles of Klimt’s gaze, which vacillates between consuming and melding with the female body. It is this emotional fluidity that distinguishes Klimt’s erotic drawings from the banal realm of pornography, and creates an intense psychological reaction in the viewer. in producing high quality collotype plates especially for prints that required three plates for color separation. The care with which the prints were made is evident throughout the portfolio: they are virtually indistinguishable from original drawings. Whether delicate or bold, Klimt’s line was faithfully rendered by the collotype process, enabling connoisseurs to own fine print versions of drawings that Klimt had long since ceased to show outside the privacy of his studio.

This artwork is from the original portfolio published in 1919. The edition number is #208/500.

Gustav Klimt (July 14, 1862 – February 6, 1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. Klimt is noted for his paintings, murals, sketches, and other objets d'art. Klimt's primary subject was the female body, and his works are marked by a frank eroticism. In addition to his figurative works, which include allegories and portraits, he painted landscapes. Among the artists of the Vienna Secession, Klimt was the most influenced by Japanese art and its methods. Early in his artistic career, he was a successful painter of architectural decorations in a conventional manner. As he developed a more personal style, his work was the subject of controversy that culminated when the paintings he completed around 1900 for the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna were criticized as pornographic. He subsequently accepted no more public commissions, but achieved a new success with the paintings of his "golden phase", many of which include gold leaf. Klimt's work was an important influence on his younger contemporary Egon Schiele.

The artwork will be shipped with a Certificate of Authenticity with matching holograms.