Hope I, 1903

The form of a nude pregnant woman with the skin stretched across the rounded womb is surely one of the most beautiful and satisfying for any painter or sculptor and it is strange that there should have been a taboo in Western art on the representation of pregnancy. Klimt was one of the first artists to break this taboo. In 1908 there was a major scandal when Jacob Epstein sculpted a semi-nude pregnant woman to fill a niche on the exterior of the British Medical Association building in London. Even Klimt did not dare to show this painting publicly until the second Vienna Kunstschau in 1909 by which time he presumably hoped that the Viennese public had been sufficiently softened up by the shocking innovations of his younger contemporaries, Schiele, Kokoschka and Gerstl.

Despite the title, the meaning of this painting is by no means entirely optimistic. As in Munch’s print Madonna, the themes of conception and birth are intertwined with those of decay and death represented by the row of sinister heads at the top of the picture.