The Three Ages of Woman 1905

Gustav Klimt made *The Three Ages of Woman* with oil on canvas sometime around 1905. Klimt layers and patterns here, the flat decorative motifs against the more modeled figures. Look how the paint doesn't try to hide itself! It celebrates the act of art-making as a process. The skin is pale, almost ghostly, and the background feels both flat and dense, like a tapestry or a wall of symbols. The old woman’s bowed head, her sunken chest and the dark space around her – they all tell a story of time's passage. Then, beside her, the mother and child are all light and love. The textures contrast the delicate swirling strokes that define the mother and child, against the rougher, more gestural marks depicting the older woman. This contrast isn’t just about surface; it’s about feeling. I think of the symbolist painters like Moreau, but Klimt is doing his own thing, walking the line between decoration and depth. It's an ongoing conversation about how to see and how to feel, and how to make those things meet on a canvas.