Death and Life

Death and Life (German: Tod und Leben, Italian: Morte e Vita) is an oil-on-canvas painting by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt. The painting was started in 1908 and completed in 1915. It depicts an allegorical subject in an Art Nouveau (Modern) style. The painting measures 178 by 198 centimeters and is now housed at the Leopold Museum in Vienna.

History In 1911 Death and Life received first prize in the world exhibitions in Rome. In 1912 Klimt exhibited the painting at an art exhibition in Dresden.

Further exhibitions of the painting took place e.g. 1913 in Budapest and Mannheim, 1914 in Prague, 1916 in Berlin, 1917 in Stockholm, 1917 / 1918 in Copenhagen, 1918 in Zurich and from 1923 several times in Vienna, 1958 in Venice and 1965 in New York and London.

Klimt made changes to the painting in 1915, after the first five exhibitions of the painting. He changed the background from gold-colored to grey and added some mosaics.

Description This is one of Klimt's central themes, central also to his time and to his contemporaries, among them Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele. Klimt makes of it a modern dance of death, but unlike Schiele, he introduces a note of hope and reconciliation: Instead of feeling threatened by the figure of death, his human beings seem to disregard it. The imagination of the artist is focused no longer on physical union, but rather on the expectation that precedes it. Perhaps this new found serenity is rooted in Klimt's own awareness of aging and closeness to death. But before the moment came he chose to depict nothing more than moments of intense pleasure or miraculous beauty and youth.