Portrait of Friederike Maria Beer, 1916

The youthful, pleasure-loving and cultured Friederike Maria Beer was the only woman in Vienna with the wealth and the good taste to commission both Klimt and Egon Schiele to paint major portraits of her, thus providing a unique point of comparison between the two great Viennese painters. The portrait by the young Schiele dates from 1914 and that of the older Klimt came two years later. Friederike Maria Beer’s plump and placid comeliness challenged both artists to make interesting and characteristic pictures. She was neither fatal nor neurotic. Schiele imposed some of his own anorexic nervosity on the healthy young woman. He placed her stretched out on the floor. Seen from above, she is surrounded by emptiness and seems to flail against her fate. To judge from contemporary photographs, Klimt’s portrait is more faithful to her personality and physical appearance. He solved the problem of making her slightly bovine calm, and in surrounding her with battling figures, lifted from an oriental vase in the artist’s collection. The characteristic flattening and compression of space makes it look as if their swords and lances are plunging into the body of the unconcerned young woman. Klimt’s “vanquished horror” could not be more different from the minimalist background of Schiele’s portrait.