Standing Female Figure in a Patterned Gown; Study for Portrait of Friederike Maria Beer (1916)

1915/16, Pencil on paper, 572 x 375 mm

This work will be included in Marian Bisanz-Prakken’s supplement to Alice Strobl’s catalogue raisonné of the drawings of Gustav Klimt

Provenance: Serge Sabarsky Gallery, New York Private collection, Florida (from 1976)

The modish Viennese woman-about-town Friederike Maria Beer (1891–1980) was to feature, in Klimt’s painting of her – commissioned, for a fee of 20,000 crowns, by her friend the wealthy artist Hans Boehler – in her self-proclaimed role as “a walking advertisement” for the Wiener Werkstätte, and above all for its colourful patterned fabrics. Klimt both heightened this aspect (asking her to reverse her fur jacket so as to display its lining) and set out to compete with it (greatly enlarging motifs from a Chinese vase for the background). From 1929 the portrait was on loan to the inaugural display at Vienna’s Moderne Galerie; but by the late 1930s it had joined Beer in New York, to which she had moved earlier that decade.