(Vienna 1862–1918)
Stehende Dame mit Cape von vorne (Studie für das Bildnis Adele Bloch-Bauer) / Standing lady with cape from the front (Study for the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer), c. 1903, on the reverse export stamp of the Austrian Conservation ministry, black chalk on paper, 44.5 x 32 cm, framed

Registered and illustrated:
Alice Strobl, Gustav Klimt. Die Zeichnungen 1878–1918, vol. IV (supplement), Verlag der Galerie Welz, Salzburg 1989, cat. rais. 3528a

Provenance:
sale, Galerie Kornfeld, Berne, 23 June 1982, lot 396
Private Collection, Austria

Compare:
Marian Bisanz-Prakken, Klimt’s Studies for Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, in: Klimt and the Women of Vienna’s Golden Age 1900-1918, exh. cat., Ed. Tobias G. Natter, Neue Galerie New York, 2016/17, pp. 80–95.

We are grateful to Marian Bisanz-Prakken for examining the work in original and for her help in cataloguing this work.

In 1903, Gustav Klimt received his first commission to paint a portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, wife of the Jewish industrialist Ferdinand Bloch. While his famous “Adele Bloch-Bauer I” (Neue Galerie, New York) from 1907 shows the subject in a seated pose, he painted her as a full-length portrait in a standing, strictly frontal pose in 1912 (private collection). Gustav Klimt developed both works in several study sheets from 1903/04 and 1911/12 respectively.

The present sheet is associated with the group of standing figures. They are listed as variants from 1903 in Alice Strobl, Volume I, nos. 1101–1115 and in Supplementary Volume IV, nos. 3528–3530. The early studies are in black chalk on wrapping paper, the later studies of 1911/12, Strobl II, nos. 2086-2097 as well as Strobl IV, nos. 3637–3638a, are in pencil on Japanese paper. Of the first sketches, the present study shows most clearly the artistic idea of the figgure set straight and frontally in the picture, an idea that Klimt probably adopted from the depiction of Theodora after his visit to San Vitale in Ravenna in 1903. The element of tension lies in the contrast between the .gure raised entirely in the plane – typically the head cut off at the top – and the dynamic, gestural sketching of the cloak.