The Dancer 1918

When he died, Klimt was in the process of transforming this picture from a commissioned portrait that had been rejected by the sitter into something more personal. Once again, it is a picture that hints at new directions in Klimt’s work. The years immediately preceding the First World War saw an unprecedented acceleration of avant-garde tendencies in Western art. The Cubist revolution initiated by Picasso and Braque spread rapidly through the Western World with numerous cutting edge movements including Futurism, Orphism, Contructivism and Vorticism spinning off in all directions. Though Vienna itself was not greatly affected Klimt would only have to have travelled as far as Munich to see some of the most daring experiments of the period. The shifting and tilted perspectives in the lower half of this picture are perhaps the only indications that Klimt might have picked up on some aspects of cubism, had he lived longer.