Le phénomène de la maternité et les sujets feminins chez Gustav Klimt
Maternity and Feminist Topics in Gustav Klimt's Works

Summary/Abstract: In the early twentieth century, the Viennese symbolist Gustav Klimt offered us an image of feminine beauty, tormented, violent, eroticized, opposed to the classical tradition and left us some famous secular maternities, which refer to the symbolism of the cycle of life and death. His allegorical maternities, which provoked a real scandal at the time, contain much ambivalence about the sensuality of the woman, object of prejudices, despite the apparent freedom of morals that reigned in the intellectual circles. Klimt's feminist topics, which are both sensual and strangely disturbing, will emerge from the anonymity to which Viennese society at the time compels them, that is, to the three K – Kinder, Kirche, Küche (Children, Church, Kitchen) either on the divan of Freud, for those of the upper middle class who manifest hysterical symptoms, or in the salons they held, through art.

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