Up Close With Klimt's 'Fritza Riedler'

Klimt already had an excellent reputation as a portrait painter by around 1905. During these years, for example, he created a Portrait of Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein, the daughter of wealthy industrialist and art patron Karl Wittgenstein. At the same time, he worked on a Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.

Around or shortly before 1906, Professor Alois Riedler, who was born in Graz and taught at the Institute of Technology in Berlin-Charlottenburg, commissioned Klimt to create a portrait of his 46-year-old wife Fritza. Fritza was born Friederike Langer in Berlin in 1860 and died in Vienna in 1927.

Little is known about Fritza Riedler's life. There is not a single photographic portrait of her. She frequently traveled between Berlin and Vienna. Klimt painted her portrait in his studio, which was then located on Josefstädter Straße near the city center.

Klimt spent an unusually long time completing his portraits. He placed a lot of value in putting together the perfect composition which would convey a sense of idealism and harmony. After all, Klimt was unsurpassed in terms of technically perfect painting layouts.

The portrait of Fritza Riedler is quite impressive in terms of the masterful way Klimt depicts the fabric of the dress and the face and hands of the person portrayed with painstaking effort, perceptibly fleshing out these parts.

This detailed realism is diametrically opposed to the almost abstract geometric shapes in the decorative pattern of the armchair and the design of the background.

This contrasting effect is particularly spectacular in the section with the head of Fritza Riedler. Her head appears directly in front of a semicircle decorated with mosaic layers. This likely reminded Klimt's contemporaries of the infant portraits by Velazquez which were especially popular at the time.

It is this confrontation between hyper-realism and ornamental abstractionism, common in Klimt's work, that ended up being one of the master's greatest innovations. It opened up new visual possibilities and propelled Klimt's art beyond the typical Art Nouveau style.