KLIMT AND MEDICINE - THE FLOW OF LIFE

When Gustav Klimt unveiled Medicine in 1901, the work sparked outrage by challenging conventional ideas about science, progress, and the human condition, becoming one of the defining cultural controversies of its time. Withdrawn by the artist and destroyed during World War II, Medicine remains one of the most fascinating lost masterpieces of modern art.

Through paintings, drawings, archival photographs, and restored imagery, this volume reconstructs the history, meaning, and legacy of the work while placing it within the intellectual ferment of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Essays explore the connections between art, anatomy, psychology, philosophy, evolutionary theory, and modern medical science.

Leading scholars reveal Klimt's engagement with the ideas reshaping his era, in particular microscopical cell examination, Darwinian concepts of human evolution, and the discovery of the unconscious. Reproductions of related masterpieces highlight the themes of birth and death, sexuality, consciousness and transformation.