The Unfinished Portrait That Haunted Gustav Klimt's Final Days

[00:00:00]Vienna, February 1918.

[00:00:04]The studio on Feld Mule Gas has been locked for two weeks since they carried the body out. An assistant comes in to sort through things and stops at the easel. There's a face on the canvas.

[00:00:16]Half of it finished. Carnations, a floral wreath around the figure, confident, dense brush work. The last few weeks had clearly gone well. The other half bare pencil lines. Not a single stroke of paint.

[00:00:31]>> An unfinished work. Every painter leaves dozens of those.

[00:00:35]>> Not this one. The woman on the canvas has been dead for 6 years. This is the third time he's tried to bring her back.

[00:00:44]The first attempt, the family refused it. The second, he couldn't get the likeness and painted someone else over it. The third is where his own death found him. literally midbrushstroke.

[00:00:57]>> Who is he?

[00:00:58]>> The most expensive portrait painter of the art nuvo era. One of the founders of the Austrian secession. The movement that broke Austrian Academy painting open and made Vienna the center of European modernism for a decade. The man whose name is on the kiss and on the gold portrait of Adele Block Bower. His name was Gustaf Climpmpt. The version everyone knows. Hedenist in a loose robe, models everywhere, gold on every canvas. A kind of beauty cult without limits.

[00:01:31]>> Vienna's favorite scandal.

[00:01:33]>> And that's not wrong. It's just not complete. For 40 years, he painted women in a way that made them stop aging. The gold ground removes time from the canvas. No wrinkles, no date, no death, just eternity in a frame. women of means lined up specifically for that effect, >> buying themselves immortality.

[00:01:55]>> That's exactly how they understood it.

[00:01:58]He figured out how it worked in 1903 when he went to Ravena to see the Byzantine mosaics. And after that trip, the canvases changed completely. In the church of San Vital, figures stand against a gold ground outside of time and space. Not in a specific place, not in a specific moment, just existing. He didn't bring back a style. He brought back a principle. Gold is how you pull a person out of time and place them in eternity.

[00:02:30]>> And there's something almost transactional about it when you look at who was commissioning him. The wealthy Jewish families of Vienna, the letterers, the block bowers, the circles around the secession. These were people who had built enormous fortunes within living memory, who lived inside an empire that tolerated them without fully accepting them. And Climpmpt was offering them something no amount of social integration could buy, the image of permanence, of having always been there, of outlasting whatever came next.

[00:03:03]>> And he understood the value of what he was selling. His prices reflected it.

[00:03:07]which makes what happened with Ria Monk so strange because if there's anyone who should have been able to deliver exactly that >> it's him. And yet across hundreds of portraits and thousands of preparatory drawings, there is exactly one face he never finished. Not one canvas, three.

[00:03:27]Three attempts at the same woman.

[00:03:30]>> The man who could make anyone immortal three times. The same face. That's the question that runs through everything here. Not who she was, but why this was the one face the gold refused. Before we get there, the myth needs a little dismantling.

[00:03:50]After Climp's death, 14 women filed paternity claims.

[00:03:54]>> 14. That number gets repeated everywhere.

[00:03:58]>> Three were confirmed. The other 11 were claims, not facts. 14 is the number of lawsuits, not the number of children.

[00:04:07]But myth is more convenient than fact, and Climpmp never corrected it.

[00:04:11]>> Why would someone sustain a rumor that makes him look like that?

[00:04:15]>> Because that rumor covered something less cinematic. People who knew him personally described a daily life that was almost painfully ordered. Same schedule, same route to the studio, the same suburban workshop, the same from one year to the next. Any disruption to his routine hit him physically almost.

[00:04:36]He was up at 6 at the eel by 7, done by two in the afternoon every day. So not debauchery, discipline, >> a hedonist on the canvas. At home, a man for whom any deviation from the familiar was genuinely difficult to bear. And the reputation for access helped explain away why he never married, never moved, and why he came home every evening to the same house with the same people. The rumor asked fewer questions >> or it answered the wrong questions so no one thought to ask the right ones.

[00:05:10]>> Exactly. And the right ones were considerably harder. December 12th, 1911. Ria Monk, 27 years old. Her fianceé, the German writer Hans Hines Ayes, a figure with a reputation for provocation, even by Bohemian standards, breaks off the engagement by letter. He calls her an incurable romantic, out of touch with reality. A few days after Christmas, Ria takes a revolver and shoots herself in the chest. Her mother, a ranka monk, from one of Vienna's prominent families. Oranka's sister, Serena Letterer, is married to August Letterer, Climpmp's most significant private patron. Through that connection, Oranka comes to Climpmpt with a commission, aostumous portrait of her daughter.

[00:05:56]>> Was that a normal thing to commission? A portrait of someone who'd already died?

[00:06:01]>> Completely normal at the time. There was an entire industry around it.

[00:06:05]Photography hadn't yet displaced painting from that function. Families with means regularly commissioned portraits of the dead from photographs, from death masks, from memory. Climp takes the commission almost immediately.

[00:06:19]1912. The canvas is called Ria Monk on her deathbed. A pale face framed by carnations, lips slightly parted as if asleep. Technically, one of the most tender things he ever made.

[00:06:33]>> Aranga couldn't accept it. She couldn't look at it. It showed death too honestly. Not sleep, not rest, but the actual face of a woman who was gone. She refuses the canvas and asks Climpmp to start again. This time with no trace of the deathbed. Make her look alive.

[00:06:51]>> Which is almost an impossible thing to ask. Not technically. Technically, it's just a portrait. But what she's actually asking for is to have her daughter back.

[00:07:01]And those aren't the same commission.

[00:07:03]That's precisely where it breaks. And here the documents take over. Two letters from Climpmpt to Amelia Fluga, his closest friend across decades.

[00:07:13]February 1912, he's postponed delivering the monk portrait until autumn, he writes, and he's glad of the delay.

[00:07:21]February 1913, exactly a year later, the monk portrait has become a sick, painful point. I can't make it work. I can't make it look like her, he writes. That's his word. Doesn't look like her.

[00:07:35]>> His word. And that matters because likeness had never been his problem.

[00:07:40]Hundreds of portraits, satisfied clients, the resemblance always there.

[00:07:45]But likeness to a living person is one thing. What the family wanted was something more specific. Recognizable features. The particular details that make this face this face and not any other dark-haired woman with flowers around her. likeness as proof of identity and that turned out to be something different.

[00:08:06]>> Why come to Climpmpt for that at all then? Any competent portrait painter on the next street over could have delivered a likeness in a week.

[00:08:13]>> Because for a family of that standing, there was no other option. To commission someone less prominent would have been to admit that a lesser work was good enough for Ria.

[00:08:23]>> Or maybe it was also about him. turning this down would have meant the same thing from the other direction. That this particular job was beyond him, that he couldn't do it. And maybe the reason he kept coming back twice, three times wasn't loyalty to the family or professional pride. Maybe it was that he genuinely couldn't accept that there was something his hand refused to do.

[00:08:46]>> The second canvas goes nowhere either.

[00:08:49]He eventually paints over it, another woman's face on top of the contours that had been Ria. Today, it's a standalone work in a museum collection, and almost no one who stands in front of it knows whose face was underneath.

[00:09:03]>> He erased her and painted someone else over her.

[00:09:06]>> He did exactly what he' done better than anyone for 40 years. Took a specific woman and turned her into ornament. Gold over biography. Except this time, the transformation wasn't a compliment. It was the only exit he could find from a commission he couldn't complete any other way.

[00:09:25]>> That's actually the most telling detail in the whole story. Because he could have just abandoned the canvas, left it blank, told the family it wasn't working and handed back what he had. Instead, he painted over it. He chose to make it into something else entirely rather than leave it as an unfinished Ria. There's something almost protective about that or defensive like he couldn't stand having a failure sitting in the studio with her name on it.

[00:09:52]>> And yet he painted death constantly.

[00:09:55]Death and life. Hope one with the skull visible just behind the pregnant figure's shoulder. Beauty and dissolution right next to each other.

[00:10:05]And it never caused him any trouble. So why was this different? Because in those paintings, it was his death, his decision about how close to let it come.

[00:10:15]Here, the family was making that decision and they wanted it gone. They wanted him to undo something that had already happened. And that's a completely different ask.

[00:10:26]>> One he had no training for, >> though. Honestly, how would he even know how to try? Nobody teaches you to paint absence back into presence. No, but he had some experience with it long before Ria in his own house. 1892.

[00:10:43]Climpmp is still co-owner of the family decorating firm he and his brother Ernst and the painter Fron Mch have been painting theater ceilings across the empire, a stable and profitable operation. That year, within a few months of each other, his father dies, a goldsmith's by trade, and his younger brother Erns dies. Both of them that year >> both Gustaf as the eldest remaining son becomes the legal guardian of four people. His mother, his two unmarried sisters, and Ernst's one-year-old daughter. From that point until his own death, he lives under one roof at the height of his fame, earning enormous sums from the wealthiest families in Vienna, coming home every evening to the same house >> while fathering children elsewhere >> in parallel. And these were two completely separate compartments that never touched. The studio, the models, the commissions, one world. The apartment on Westbon Strasa with his mother and sisters, another. They never crossed onto a canvas until a specific moment. In one of the very few personal letters that survive from the late 1900s, Climpmp writes about his older sister Clara in a single sentence. She lost her mind several years ago. He says it that directly, >> no softening. And his mother, Anna, a singer in her earlier years, loses her own mind in the years that follow.

[00:12:08]Museum sources note that she would live out her last years, already unable to recognize where she was or who she was with.

[00:12:15]>> And every evening, this man walks home from a studio where he's been painting women outside of time. Women who will never age. Women preserved in gold. And then he comes home to this >> every evening for 30 years.

[00:12:32]>> I keep thinking about what that does to a person. Not the grief, grief is legible, but the specific experience of building a professional life around the idea that you can hold someone in permanence while living inside a house where you watch permanence fail slowly in the people closest to you. That's not a contradiction you can resolve. You just carry it. In 1910, two things happen at the same time. Climpmp breaks the gold style, the one his entire reputation rests on for the past decade, and starts work on death and life, the figures no longer in gold, the paint denser and more anxious. Something has shifted inside the principal itself. And in that same year, with no commission, no buyer, no exhibition in mind, he draws his mother several times, >> just draws her.

[00:13:24]>> He sits across from a woman who is physically still there, but mentally already somewhere else, and he records it in pencil, not for exhibition, not for sale. These drawings were never shown publicly in his lifetime. He just sits and looks and draws what he sees.

[00:13:43]That's the only time in his entire career he drew without a destination. No viewer, no price. And what he chose to record, the one thing urgent enough to draw for no one was a person disappearing.

[00:13:56]>> The dates fit that reading. Whether he would have put it that way, we don't know. What we do know is what he started drawing that year and what he stopped doing with gold, >> which is exactly what the second Ria canvas couldn't give the family. When you draw for yourself, likeness isn't the objective. Not looking away is. And those are different skills. The family needed the first. He only had the second when it actually mattered to him personally.

[00:14:24]>> In 1917, he was asked to do it again.

[00:14:28]The monk family, after two failures in a row, comes back to Climpmpt with a third commission. It's been nearly 7 years since Ria died. Aranka still wants the portrait still from him >> after everything.

[00:14:43]>> He takes a photograph of Ria and makes around 20 preparatory drawings from it.

[00:14:48]The canvas is nearly 2 m tall. One of the largest female portraits he ever attempted and he works differently this time. Ria stands at a slight angle turning toward the viewer. Something alive in her eyes, almost a smile around her. A pattern of flowers and birds. his late manner, looser and warmer than the gold period.

[00:15:08]>> Like he found a different way in. Not trying to make her permanent, just trying to make her present.

[00:15:14]>> Maybe. Or maybe he'd stopped fighting the assignment and decided to put living things around her instead of trying to make her alive herself. We don't have a letter that explains. That same year, the Vienna and Munichmies finally nominate him for an honorary professorship 20 years after he walked out of the institution and founded the secession with the people who also found the old framework suffocating.

[00:15:38]>> Recognition arriving at exactly this moment, >> January 10th, 1918. Shortly after returning from a trip to Romania, he has a stroke in the studio. His right hand stops working. The doctor orders complete rest. Does he listen >> for two weeks? No. He has his assistant hand him brushes and keeps putting paint on the same canvas. Ria's face is still unfinished. Half paralyzed, he tries to get there. Then pneumonia, a complication from the stroke, the winter of 1918. Spanish flu already spreading across Europe. On the 6th of February, he dies in the clinic, never having returned to the studio. the same studio, the same man at the eel. Except this time there's no one across from him.

[00:16:25]Just pencil lines waiting for paint that never came. In 1910, he drew his mother because she was disappearing and he needed to hold some of that before it was gone. In 1918, he keeps painting Ria because he can't accept that the one commission he came back to three times is going to defeat him. One is an act of grief. The other is an act of refusal.

[00:16:46]And it cost him the same thing in the end.

[00:16:49]>> The floral wreath around the figure is nearly complete. Dense, confident brush work. His hand was working well in those final weeks. The face itself is half pencil. Not a single stroke of paint.

[00:17:01]>> And the canvas just stood there.

[00:17:04]>> The canvas just stood there. The canvas passes to Ianka. She keeps it at her villa. In 1941, the Nazis confiscate the family's property. Aranka is deported to Poland. She dies that same year.

[00:17:16]>> And the paintings >> scatter. One of the Ria Monk portraits spends decades in the Lentos Museum in Lintz without a clear owner. It had passed through a vianese art dealer who worked with the Nazi administration. It isn't returned to the family's heirs until 2009.

[00:17:33]>> 68 years.

[00:17:34]>> 68. And the third canvas, the one that was standing on the easel in February 18, is exhibited today as an unfinished work. Pencil and paint on the same surface, side by side, never having met.

[00:17:47]>> I've been sitting with these three attempts the whole time. At first, I thought it was about death, that he simply didn't know how to paint the dead. But he'd done that before, calmly, on commission, without difficulty. It wasn't about death. It was that for the one and only time in his career, someone asked him not for beauty. They asked for a specific person back particular not reducible to ornament. And he'd spent 40 years learning to do the exact opposite.

[00:18:17]Once in his life, it stopped working.

[00:18:19]And that's why he didn't stop after the first attempt or the second.

[00:18:23]>> The pencil lines are still on the canvas.

[00:18:26]>> The paint that should have covered them isn't >> and won't be.