Charlotte Mullins comments on The Three Ages of Woman
IN The Three Ages of Woman, a naked woman with flaming hair studded with flowers stands holding a sleeping infant. Her head is bowed so it rests on top of the baby girl’s. A transparent veil swirls around their legs and discs of blue and gold occupy the spaces between their slender limbs. Next to them, an older naked figure stands in profile, her breasts sagging, her stomach distended. The woman’s head is bowed, hair falling in waves so we cannot see her face. She clutches her brow in sorrow, her shoulders hunched, her hands landscaped with veins. She stands in front of a patterned surface that simultaneously resembles trees, geological strata and textile design.
All the women in The Three Ages of Woman have their eyes closed or obscured. Vienna saw the publication of Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams in 1899 and many popular plays and poems took the unconscious as their subject. Klimt similarly takes us into a dreamlike world, where figures float untethered from reality.
This painting was completed in 1905, the year Klimt resigned as the founding president of the Vienna Secession. The Secession had put Austrian art on the map and provided artists with a place to exhibit their exciting new variants of Modernism. Klimt’s own style had developed rapidly from traditional fin-desiècle portraiture to a dramatic flattening of the picture plane. His female sitters fused with the decorated rooms and patterned gowns that surrounded them, only their faces retaining any semblance of naturalism.