Photo By Gail
Mäda Primavesi (1912–1913) is a portrait painted by Gustav Klimt and it’s one of his most charming and unique works. Here’s the painting’s engaging backstory.
The Subject
Mäda Primavesi was a young girl from a wealthy Viennese family. Her father, Otto Primavesi, was a banker and industrialist, and her mother, Eugenia, was a patron of the arts, so the family moved in the kind of circles where commissioning a portrait from Gustav Klimt made perfect sense.
Mäda was about nine years old when Klimt painted her, and the portrait captures her strong personality and self-possession. Unlike more demure child portraits of the era, Mäda stands confidently, feet apart, hands on hips, looking directly at the viewer.
The Style
This piece is distinctively Klimtian, yet it marks a slight shift. The background is a tapestry of pastel florals and decorative motifs, almost like a stage setting. Mäda wears an ornate white dress (specially-made for her for this sitting) with bright patterns (somewhat Japanese-influenced), which blends into the decorative backdrop.
Klimt’s use of color is luminous, and there’s a mix of flat patterning and three-dimensional realism, especially in the face.It’s more restrained than his “golden phase” works like The Kiss, but still incredibly vibrant.
Why It’s Special
The painting is a rare example of Klimt painting a child, and it radiates the modern, empowered energy of a girl who knows her own mind. The artist usually painted femmes fatales and society women, so this portrait stands out for its freshness and youth.
Mäda’s expression and posture convey a remarkable degree of confidence for a nine-year-old girl, even one who was, by her own account, willful and a tomboy. Her pose has been interpreted as assertive, even rebellious for its time. It’s easy to imagine her growing into a strong woman, which she did. She passed away in 2000, at age 97.
The portrait also testifies to the sophisticated taste of her parents, who were ardent supporters of progressive Viennese art and design. In fact, Klimt soon painted Eugenia’s portrait, which now hangs in the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art in Japan.
As a side note, this painting was seized by Nazis from owner Jenny Pulitzer Steiner in Vienna in 1938, and restituted to her in 1951. In 1964, it was a gifted to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC (where this photo was taken) in Pulitzer’s memory by her daughter Clara Mertens and her husband Andre.