Study of an Old woman

Study of an old woman - Plate 25  is the last collotype from “ Gustav Klimt : Fünfundzwanzig Handzeichnungen” , a limited-edition collection of 25 monochrome and two-color  collotypes after drawings by Gustav Klimt.

Published by  Gilhofer and Ranschburg, Vienna, July 1919.   Edition of 500 prints, numbered, with the first group numbered I-X including an original drawing by Klimt.

This is  a beautiful plate representing a nude of an old woman. Signed on stone on the lower right margin. In very good conditions, including an ivory-colored cardboard passepartout (cm  59.3 x 40).

Original Title: Studie einer alter Frau

The original pencil sketch is held at the Lederer Collection , in Vienna, as the others original drawings of the portfolio. 

All the works were printed posthumously, one year after Klimt’s death, by the  Kunstanstalt Max Jaffé , a Viennese specialist in fine art collotypes.

The complex  collotype printing process perfectly rendered Klimt’s remarkably spontaneous drawing style.

This dichromate-based photographic process was invented in 1856, before lithography. The gelatin plates required a very delicate preparation involving light exposure, washing, and drying. Collotype plates could not be re-used: the limited-edition prints from colloid ink were stable and they had no chance of fading like other photographic processes of the time. Later on, lithography replaced this technique, which has now become nearly forgotten.

The importance of this portfolio lies in the aesthetic achievement of capturing the variations of Klimt's style between 1898 and 1917. These drawings of women are suffused by a veil of sexuality, well-accepted by the Viennese society. F ünfundzwanzig Handzeichnungen confroms  to the category of privately circulated erotic material of the Vienna's upper middle class men. The emotional fluidity of Klimt’s erotic drawings created and still creates an intense psychological reaction in the viewer.

Fünfundzwanzig Handzeichnungen  reveals Klimt's eyes and their penetrating observation of  the female world, his sight on the nubile youth women to craggy old age, as in this case. His drawings reveal a profound identification with the female form and his creative energy, while their flowing and darting lines demostrate the flexibility of his technique.