Goldfish, 1901-1902

Goldfish presents female sexuality as something at once fascinating and menacing. The smiles of the floating women are both enticing and chilling. Their coquettishness is reminiscent of the Rhinemaidens in the opening scene of Wagner’s Das Rheingold. They are all endowed with an abundance of flowing hair – the ultimate weapon of seduction. At a time when respectable women kept their hair up and under careful control in public situations, the sight of such free-flowing hair held connotations of the loss of inhibitions and unbridled sexuality. In the late nineteenth century and up to the First World War artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Beardsley, Waterhouse, Degas, Munch, Mucha, Toorop and Klimt himself, indulged in fetishist fantasies of women’s hair.

Just as hair could be used to envelop, entrap and even suffocate or strangle, water too had connotations of dangerous sexuality and drowning and was often associated with femme fatales and sirens. The elongated vertical format of this painting, foreign to the Western tradition, derives ultimately from Chinese scroll painting via Japanese woodblock prints.