Reclining Nude with Drapery, Back View 1917 - 1918

Curator: Look at the intimacy of this drawing. Gustav Klimt created this pencil drawing titled, "Reclining Nude with Drapery, Back View" sometime between 1917 and 1918. It's currently held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Editor: The image feels so… incomplete, doesn't it? Ethereal. Almost as if the artist captured a fleeting dream. It really puts on display how the objectification of women can feel like the erasure of them at the same time. Curator: Interesting take. The loose lines, yes, they certainly lend a sense of impermanence, a sketch of a passing moment, rather than a monumental declaration. But perhaps this is Klimt acknowledging the complex reality of the female form and, even further, how complicated it can be when the gaze is male. Editor: Precisely. How can the male gaze ever represent a woman fully, without also participating in some level of the woman's subjugation and representation? Curator: In a culture steeped in symbolist and Romantic ideals, Klimt's choice to depict the nude is, itself, a statement, participating in conversations that have stretched back centuries. There's the visual echo of countless reclining Venuses, but with an unidealized twist that suggests some level of self awareness on the artist's part. Editor: It's almost as if he’s struggling with the history he inherits as a man in art. This work is after his Gold Period and represents a loosening of strict societal standards due to war, yet here we have him making art through these standards. Is this really liberation or complicity? What is it trying to signal in such tumultuous times? Curator: Maybe both? There’s definitely a push and pull in this sketch between traditional romanticism and more liberated and less idealized portrayals. You make me see that more clearly. Editor: This piece is so full of historical tensions. I am going to need some time to mull this one over.