Gustave Klimt- Hope II 1907-08

This painting is done with oil, gold and platinum on canvas. It depicts a pregnant woman with her breasts exposed and a skull on her pregnant belly. She is wearing a long colorful detailed robe and there are three other women under her robe with their eyes closed and their hands up. The four women look like they are praying which evokes feelings of hope. The praying and the closed eyes evoke feelings of calmness and peace.

What captured my attention about this piece is detail in terms of color and pattern on the robe and the dress. The robe has a pattern of gold circles and smaller circles overlapping. The dress is yellow with patterns of beautiful blues and pinks. It is really interesting how the woman and the 3 other women are one unified single form of the painting. The colors are also really bright, which also symbolizes hope, and the background is just a rich shade of green. It shows how special and important the process of motherhood is.

The skull and the mother’s pregnant belly represent two parallel ideas of life, birth and death, the circle of life.  Interestingly enough when Gustave Klimt was working on Hope I, his one year old Otto died suddenly. Klimt lived in Vienna around the same time that Sigmund Freud and his ideas on family and sexual drives were starting to get popular. Around this time period, pregnant woman were also rarely depicted.

-Michele