Death and Life

At the left, Death - a grinning skeleton wrapped in a patterned robe and holding a club - gazes across a gap toward a dense, sleeping cluster of human figures of every age, from infants to the old, woven into a tapestry of glowing color. Gustav Klimt sets the two against a sombre ground, the living oblivious to the watcher beside them. Now in Vienna's Leopold Museum, Death and Life is his great meditation on the human cycle - mortality and the generations held in eternal, decorative tension, beauty and the grave forever side by side.