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History: how it was made
Gustav Klimt painted The Women Friends between 1916 and 1917, during the final years of his life and at a time when the broader social world of Vienna was under the profound strain of the First World War. The painting belongs to a group of late works in which Klimt returned repeatedly to the subject of women in close physical and emotional proximity, exploring themes of female intimacy, solidarity, and interiority. The work was in private hands for much of the twentieth century and was tragically among the paintings destroyed in the fire at Schloss Immendorf in 1945, when retreating German forces set fire to the castle where a number of Klimt paintings had been stored for safekeeping. Its existence and appearance are now known primarily through black-and-white photographs taken before the war. The destruction of The Women Friends, along with several other Klimt canvases stored at Immendorf, represents one of the most significant losses of early twentieth-century European art caused by the Second World War. Before the war, the painting had been exhibited and reproduced, establishing a degree of art historical record, but the loss of the physical object has complicated the ability of scholars to analyze its surface qualities, color relationships, and material construction in the way that surviving works can be examined. Despite this, the painting holds an important place in the study of Klimt's late career because it exemplifies his continued commitment to the female figure as the central vehicle for his most complex aesthetic and emotional ideas.
What makes this painting extraordinary
Based on photographic records and contemporary accounts, The Women Friends shared many formal characteristics with other late Klimt figural works. The two women are depicted in extremely close proximity, their bodies tilted toward one another so that the boundary between them is dissolved by the overlap of their garments and hair. Klimt was deeply interested in this compositional strategy, using physical closeness to suggest psychological and emotional states that would be difficult to express through posture or expression alone. The figures appear to fill the canvas from edge to edge, with little spatial recession, creating the characteristic flatness of his mature style. The surface of the painting, as reconstructed from photographic evidence, showed the elaborate decorative patterning of the garments that is central to Klimt's mature figurative language. Each area of fabric was rendered as a distinct field of ornament, with geometric and organic patterns layered to create visual density. The faces of the two women, while more naturalistically rendered than the surrounding decoration, were described by contemporary reviewers as expressing a quality of inward absorption, the two figures appearing to exist in a shared private world sealed off from the viewer. This tension between the outward decorative surface and the inward emotional life of the figures is one of the defining qualities of Klimt's late work and is particularly concentrated in this painting.
Hand-painted oil on canvas
Own Gustav Klimt’s The Women Friends as a genuine painting
Painted by hand using oil on canvas. The brushwork and texture are real, not simulated by ink.
Oil on canvas, same materials as the original
Painted by hand, not printed
Multiple sizes available
What does The Women Friends mean?
The meaning of The Women Friends centers on the representation of female intimacy as a self-sufficient and complete form of human connection. By depicting two women absorbed in one another and sealed within a shared space of ornament and proximity, Klimt created an image that does not require a male viewpoint or presence to complete its meaning. This was a recurring preoccupation in his late work, and The Women Friends represents one of the most concentrated expressions of this interest. The painting does not moralize about the nature of the relationship between the two figures but simply presents their closeness as a fact, as something complete and sufficient in itself. The broader cultural meaning of the work also engages with the specific moment of its creation, the years of the First World War, when the destruction of life and social bonds was proceeding on an almost incomprehensible scale across Europe. In this context, an image of two women in quiet, sustained intimacy takes on a particular resonance. It asserts the value of private human connection against the background of public catastrophe, suggesting that the bonds between individuals persist even as the larger social world around them fractures. The subsequent physical destruction of the painting in 1945 adds an additional, deeply ironic layer to this reading, transforming The Women Friends from a document of intimacy and endurance into a symbol of exactly the kind of irreversible loss it was painted in the shadow of.