Goldfish Gustav Klimt (1862-1918)

Description of Gustav Klimt’s painting The Goldfish

Klimt was a famous Austrian modernist painter who favored depictions of the female body, often nude and erotic, in his paintings. If a man were to appear in the picture, usually his face was unobtrusively hidden and concealed by the artist, while the woman always looked straight ahead.

The subject of his paintings caused many disputes in contemporary society - naked flesh seemed immoral to many, critics denounced Klimt without a word, but he always ignored their opinion and continued to paint in his own style.

"The Goldfish" was originally titled "To My Critics" and was intended to reflect the artist’s reaction to the flood of criticism that followed the big commission he had completed. The critics rebuked him for flouting morality - in response Gustav Klimt wrote them a painting that flouts morality definitively and blatantly sends the critics to places where the sun does not shine. It combines the underwater world and the human world in the artist’s gaze. Gold plays in the water, pierced by the sun. Blind-eyed fish go about their fishy business.

Algae move, obeying the movement of the underwater currents, and in the midst of it all, organically fitting in, like mermaids or even fish, are the women swimming. The two at the top of the picture are only the background, they are not too bright, one turned back, the other grinning, appearing only halfway.

The central image of the Golden Fish, on the other hand, is a full woman sitting in the foreground, highlighted both compositionally and with bright colors. Her red hair flutters and ripples like seaweed. She sits with her back turned to the viewer, turning around slyly - her facial expression expresses mockery and amusement, something like the phrase "Well, did you eat it?"

The obvious eroticism of her image only adds to the mockery, making it almost obscene.

This painting was followed by a new barrage of criticism, which Klimt ignored.