Water Snakes II

For many viewers in the early 1900s the most shocking feature of this picture, as well as of Hope I would have been Klimt’s unabashed depiction of the golden haze of pubic hair. Female pubic hair was one of the great unmentionable and unrepresentable subjects of the nineteenth century and indeed had hardly ever been depicted in Western art before Klimt, outside of pornography. It was a topic of intense interest to nineteenth century male libertines as we know from the Paris guide books for sexual tourists that describe the pubic hair of available women in the most specific anatomical detail. As early as the 1860s Courbet had painted a close up view of the unwaxed female pudenda that he entitled L’Origine du Monde (The Origin of the World) but this was made for the private delectation of a Turkish collector of erotica rather then for pubic exhibition.

After a lifetime of studying Western art, the British historian and critic John Ruskin was so disconcerted to discover on his wedding night that women also have pubic hair that he was unable to consummate the marriage. After 1900, thanks to Klimt, this was not a problem likely to afflict Viennese art lovers.