Water Serpents II
Four women dissolve into gold, and a fat serpent. An Indecent Masterpiece of Austrian Modernism
Gold Leaf and a Great Deal of Nerve
Let us dispense immediately with the euphemism the auction houses prefer: "friends". Water Serpents II is not a picture of friends. It is a picture of women in the middle of something far more interesting than friendship, floating weightless in a current that has no visible source and no discernible edge, their bodies laid nose to tail like the letter S written twice and folded shut. Klimt titled it after the beast that slithers across the middle of the canvas, a fat red-orange eel of a serpent, but the real subject is the human tangle it is swimming through. This is not a painting that needs a serpent to feel dangerous. The serpent is practically a chaperone.
What strikes you first, before you have worked out where one body ends and the next begins, is the sheer horizontal patience of the thing. Klimt has built this canvas as a long, low frieze, closer in shape to a decorative border than to a conventional picture, and that choice does real work: it forces your eye to travel, the way water travels, rather than to settle. There is no vertical anchor here, no upright figure to steady you, only drift. The foreground pair lie head to groin in a loose, luxuriant coil, their pale bodies rendered with a tenderness that owes more to drawing than to paint; the background pair surface further along the current, faces only, eyes closed, hair dissolving into ornament until you can no longer say with confidence where a woman stops and a pattern begins.
That dissolving is the whole trick, and it is a far more radical one than the picture's reputation as decorative Symbolist confection generally credits. Klimt spent a decade perfecting a device in which flesh, rendered with almost clinical observational skill, sits directly against passages of pure, flat, jewel-like pattern, no transition, no apology. The effect is less like looking at a painting of bodies in water than like watching bodies actively become water, or gold, or coral, depending on which patch of canvas currently has your attention. It is a disappearing act performed in oil paint, and it remains one of the most technically confident tricks in the whole of early modernism.
This is not a painting that needs a serpent to feel dangerous. The serpent is practically a chaperone.
— Philibert Octavian de GramontFour Women, One Eel, and No Names Worth Trusting
Count the figures properly and you get four, though the painting works very hard to make sure you never quite manage it in one glance. In the foreground, two women lie in full, unhurried nudity, arranged in a coil so complete that the second figure's face buries itself against the first one's hair, an embrace rather than a pose. Further back, higher in the composition, two more heads break the surface: one, framed by a dense corona of loose auburn hair and violet florets, gazes out with heavy-lidded self-possession; the other, half-cropped by the canvas edge, wears a dark, star-strewn garment that reads as fabric one moment and as night sky the next. Klimt gives none of them a name, a myth, or a fixed identity, and that refusal is not carelessness. It is policy.
The serpent, for all its top billing in the title, is almost an afterthought in the composition, a coral-red ribbon threading horizontally beneath the foreground pair, more decorative sash than menacing beast. Klimt had used real water snakes and eels as motifs before, in earlier studies for both this picture and its companion, but by the time the paint had dried here the creature had been demoted from protagonist to punctuation, a device for tying the composition together rather than a symbol demanding a moral. Scattered around the figures, the objects do far more storytelling than the reptile does: a spray of small blue-violet florets, tightly packed and faintly hallucinatory, clusters like a bouquet growing directly from a woman's scalp; loose beading and spiralling gold filament run through the coral band like veins of ore; and along the lower edge, a strip of murky olive-green suggests riverbed or seabed without ever committing to either.
What none of these objects do is anchor the scene in a place you could visit. There is no shoreline, no architecture, no weather. Klimt gives you bodies, water, ornament and light, and asks you to accept that as a complete world. It is a startlingly confident piece of editing for 1904, stripping a mythological subject of every prop a Salon painter would have considered essential and betting, correctly, that the sensuality of the composition alone would carry the picture.
A Title Character Demoted to Décor
Read the eel as the picture's true subject and Water Serpents II becomes a minor mythological curiosity. Read it as the ribbon binding two entwined women together, and the painting becomes something far more direct: a study of intimacy that borrowed a monster's name purely for cover, the way a scandalous novel borrows a respectable title.
The Golden Phase, Working at Full Stretch
By 1904 Klimt had spent the better part of a decade refining the technique that would make him both famous and unfashionable in roughly equal measure, and Water Serpents II catches that technique near its most fluent. The Golden Phase, so called for its addiction to gold and silver leaf applied directly to the canvas, borrowed its glittering surfaces from an unlikely trio of sources: the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna, which Klimt had studied on an Italian trip a few years earlier; the flat pattern-work of Egyptian and Mycenaean art then filling Vienna's museum cases; and the international vogue for Jugendstil, the Austro-German cousin of Art Nouveau, with its love of sinuous line and densely worked ornament. What is unusual about this particular canvas is how little actual gold leaf it deploys compared with contemporaries like The Kiss. The gold here is implied more than applied, carried instead by warm ochre glazes and by the coral-and-amber band running through the composition's centre.
Look closely at the handling and you find two entirely different painters sharing one canvas. The flesh is worked with the fluent, almost academic draughtsmanship Klimt learned at Vienna's Kunstgewerbeschule, soft transitions, careful anatomical logic, a real interest in how a shoulder blade sits under skin. The surrounding field, by contrast, is built from flat, repeating units, dots, spirals, densely packed florets, that owe nothing to observation and everything to pattern-design. Klimt trained as a decorative muralist before he was ever a painter of easel pictures, and that training never left him; what makes his mature work so unsettling is his refusal to keep decoration and depiction in separate rooms. Here they are pressed against one another with no seam at all.
The palette confirms the strategy. Klimt avoids the cooler blues and greens that dominate his contemporaries' water pictures, choosing instead a hot, terrestrial range, coral, ochre, aubergine, ivory flesh, that has almost nothing to do with how water actually looks and everything to do with how Klimt wanted this water to feel. This is not the North Sea. It is a decorative idea of submersion, closer to a jewel box than a river, and that is precisely the point: Klimt is painting sensation dressed as landscape, not landscape observed from life.
Klimt is painting sensation dressed as landscape, not landscape observed from life.
— Philibert Octavian de GramontA Decorator's Son Who Scandalised an Empire
Gustav Klimt was born in 1862 in Baumgarten, on Vienna's western fringe, the son of an unsuccessful gold engraver whose trade would later supply his most famous son with both a technique and a metaphor. Money was short throughout Klimt's childhood; art school, at the state-run Kunstgewerbeschule, was less a calling than a practical route to a trade, and for the better part of two decades Klimt worked as precisely the kind of artist Vienna's establishment wanted: a highly skilled decorative muralist, painting ceilings and theatre curtains in a polished, historicist style alongside his brother Ernst and their colleague Franz Matsch. The firm was successful, respectable, and utterly uncontroversial. Nothing in it predicted what came next.
What came next was 1897, and the founding of the Vienna Secession, the breakaway group of artists, Klimt its first president, who declared open revolt against the conservative Künstlerhaus and its taste for tidy academic realism. The Secession's motto, translated loosely, promised each age its own art and each art its freedom, and Klimt spent the following decade testing exactly how much freedom Vienna's bourgeoisie was actually prepared to grant him. The answer, delivered via a notorious commission for ceiling paintings at the University of Vienna depicting Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence, turned out to be considerably less than he had hoped: the panels, filled with writhing nude bodies rather than tidy allegorical figures in togas, provoked a public outcry so severe that eighty-seven professors signed a petition against them, and Klimt eventually withdrew from public commissions altogether, retreating into private patronage for the rest of his career.
Water Serpents II belongs to exactly that retreat. It was begun around 1904, in the years immediately following the university scandal, worked on intermittently, and finally completed around 1906 or 1907, commissioned by and for Jenny Steiner, the daughter of a Viennese industrialist and one of the sophisticated, wealthy patrons, many of them Jewish, who sustained Klimt's Golden Phase when the Austrian state had grown too squeamish to. It sits in a direct lineage with a run of earlier water-themed pictures, Moving Water, the enamel-bright Fish Blood, and the smaller, more overtly ornamental Water Serpents I, all of which use the female form and the medium of water to explore the same territory: bodies dissolving into pattern, desire dissolving into decoration.
A Painting Nearly as Dramatic as Its Subject
This canvas's own history reads like a plot Klimt himself might have painted. Confiscated from Jenny Steiner by the Nazi regime after she fled Vienna in 1938, it passed to the film director Gustav Ucicky, reputed to be one of Klimt's illegitimate children, and hung unrecognised in a Viennese flat for decades before resurfacing in 2012, when a settlement with Steiner's heirs finally cleared it for sale.
What the Gold Is Hiding, and What it is Revealing
My reading of this painting starts from a stubborn fact the wall labels tend to soften: Klimt was not painting a myth so much as borrowing one for shelter. Water nymphs, sirens and serpent-women had populated European painting for centuries as a licensed way of depicting female desire without appearing to endorse it, safely displaced onto the supernatural. Klimt reaches for that same alibi here, then quietly discards most of it. There is no narrative peril, no drowning sailor, no moral lesson about temptation waiting in the wings. What is left, once you strip away the mythological packaging, is an image of women absorbed entirely in one another, painted with a tenderness that has nothing to do with warning and everything to do with looking.
The ornament is doing symbolic work as much as decorative work. Those dense clusters of violet florets threaded through the hair read, to my eye, less as botanical accuracy than as a visual stand-in for interior sensation, thought and feeling made external and worn like jewellery, a device Klimt used again and again across the Golden Phase to suggest that his subjects' inner lives were as richly patterned as their surroundings. The serpent, meanwhile, functions as a hinge rather than a threat: it is the one element in the composition that still gestures toward the old cautionary mythology, and Klimt deploys it precisely so that he can politely ignore it, a nod to propriety immediately overridden by everything else on the canvas.
The dissolving boundary between skin and pattern carries the picture's deepest symbolic charge. Where flesh gives way to ornament without any visible seam, Klimt seems to be arguing that intimacy itself resists the tidy outlines society prefers to draw around it, that desire does not respect the border between one body and the next, or indeed between a body and its surroundings. Whether that dissolving reads as liberation or as erasure has divided viewers for over a century, and I do not think the picture wants that argument settled. Ambiguity, here, is not a failure of nerve. It is the whole method.
Klimt was not painting a myth so much as borrowing one for shelter.
— Philibert Octavian de GramontForget the Orgy Headline. Read the Craftsmanship Instead
What tends to get lost every time this picture resurfaces in the news, and it resurfaces often, given its status as one of the most expensive paintings ever privately traded, is that the sensational reading of Water Serpents II as a coded depiction of a lesbian encounter, endlessly repeated in auction-house copy and tabloid coverage alike, actually undersells the painting's real achievement. Yes, the intimacy on display is unmistakable, and Klimt's Vienna, for all its buttoned collars, had a substantial appetite for exactly this kind of charged ambiguity dressed in classical costume. But treating the picture chiefly as a scandal to be decoded misses what Klimt is actually doing formally, which is considerably harder to pull off than mere titillation: painting four separate figures so that they read simultaneously as distinct individuals and as a single continuous decorative rhythm, without ever letting either reading collapse into the other.
There is a second, less-discussed perspective worth setting alongside the erotic one, and it concerns the painting's second life as a financial instrument rather than a picture. By the time Water Serpents II became infamous again in the 2010s, caught in a fraud dispute between the dealer Yves Bouvier and the collector Dmitry Rybolovlev, its market value had come to matter more, in the public conversation, than anything happening on its surface. I find that instructive rather than merely regrettable: a painting Klimt made in defiant retreat from institutional approval, funded by private wealth precisely because the state had grown too nervous to touch him, ended up a century later as the plaything of exactly the kind of unaccountable private capital it was first made to serve. Klimt would, I suspect, have found the symmetry darkly funny rather than tragic. He never much trusted institutions to begin with.
Beyond the Kiss: Klimt's Real Company
Set beside The Kiss, this canvas trades monumental embrace for horizontal drift, and gold-leaf spectacle for a subtler, hotter earth palette. Its truer company sits with Klimt's own water pictures and with the wider Symbolist current, Rossetti's tangled hair, Moreau's jewelled sirens, that treated female desire as something to be dressed in myth rather than confronted directly.
The Sheer Confidence. The Flesh Disssolving into Pulsating Pattern
Stand in front of a good reproduction of Water Serpents II for long enough and you start to understand why this small, unassuming horizontal canvas has caused this much trouble for this long: a professor's petition in 1900, a Nazi confiscation in 1938, a fraud trial in the 2010s, and a permanent home nowhere at all, passed from vault to vault by men who, I would wager, have spent considerably less time actually looking at it than I have. That is the real scandal here, not the entwined bodies, which have earned their intimacy honestly, but a masterpiece of Austrian modernism that has spent most of the last century as collateral rather than as art.
What endures, whenever the painting does surface, is the sheer confidence of Klimt's method: an artist secure enough in his own draughtsmanship to let flesh dissolve into pattern without ever losing the pulse underneath it. He was already a scandal by 1904, already in retreat from official Vienna, and he used that freedom to paint something considerably stranger and more tender than the outrage it provoked would suggest. The eel gets the title. The women get the picture. That has always struck me as exactly the right division of labour.