Hope II

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About Hope II

A pregnant woman bows her head above a small human skull. Her eyes are closed, one breast is exposed and her hands gather near the swell of her abdomen. Three smaller women appear below, their heads lowered and their hands raised. Pattern covers most of the central body, while gold and platinum flatten the space around it.

The painting is now called Hope, II by the Museum of Modern Art, or Hope II in ordinary prose. Gustav Klimt called it Vision. When he first exhibited it in 1909, the canvas was unfinished and visibly different from the object known today. A 1911 studio photograph records another stage, and Klimt continued revising the work before Eugenia Primavesi acquired it in 1914.^[1][2]

Those changes matter because Hope II is not a fixed allegorical code delivered all at once. The title moved from a broad “vision” towards hope through comparison with an earlier pregnancy painting. A circular form behind the woman's head was reduced. The background changed. The object remained available for reconsideration while it was unsold.^[1][2]

The surviving image also refuses uncomplicated optimism. Pregnancy promises a future, but death's head touches the body that carries it. The lower women may pray, mourn or intercede; none of those actions can be made certain. Hope in this painting is not the absence of danger. It is a vulnerable life held in the same ornamental enclosure as mortality.

At a Glance

• ArtistGustav Klimt
• Current museum titleHope, II
• Common titleHope II
• Klimt's titleVision^[1][2]
• Date1907–08^[1]
• MediumOil, gold and platinum on canvas^[1]
• Dimensions110.5 × 110.5 centimetres^[1]
• CollectionMuseum of Modern Art, New York
• Object number468.1978^[1]
• First public appearanceInternationale Kunstschau, Vienna, 1909, shown unfinished beside Hope I^[2]
• Documented intermediate stateMoriz Nähr's May 1911 studio photograph^[2]
• Acquisition from KlimtEugenia Primavesi received the painting from Otto Primavesi as a Christmas gift in 1914^[2]
• Central imageryPregnant woman, death's head at the abdomen and three smaller bowed women
• Current displayNewly on view on Floor 5 at MoMA as of 9 August 2026; this is a dated display status, not a permanent guarantee^[1]

Annotated Details from Hope II

The painting holds pregnancy, ornament and mortality in one vertical body, with the lower figures complicating any simple promise of hope.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Details from HOPE II

These close views use the high-resolution public-domain source while keeping annotation markers in CSS rather than in the image file.

1

Lowered head

The bowed head turns the figure inward rather than toward the viewer.

2

Skull motif

The skull functions as an omen of mortality, not as a diagnosis or fixed story.

3

Pregnant body

The body is monumental and enclosed by pattern rather than clinically explained.

4

Patterned garment

The garment's gold and platinum medium belongs to this object specifically.

5

Lower women

The women below may suggest prayer, mourning or intercession without resolving into one role.

6

Vertical enclosure

The narrow upright figure makes the body read as both person and monumental column.

7

Colour pressure

Dark accents and bright pattern keep hope and threat active in the same surface.

Vision Before Hope II

Klimt did not introduce this canvas under a numbered English title. He called it Vision, and the work appeared under that name at the 1909 Internationale Kunstschau. Eugenia Primavesi still used Vision when she recorded receiving the painting in 1914.^[1][2]

“Hope II” emerged through its relation to Klimt's earlier pregnancy painting, now called Hope I. The Roman numeral is therefore retrospective and comparative. It helps separate two objects but should not suggest that Klimt planned a matched pair with fixed sequential titles.

The distinction changes interpretation. Vision encourages a broad encounter with a symbolic apparition whose exact message remains open. Hope II directs attention towards futurity, pregnancy and survival. Both names belong to the work's history, but they are not neutral synonyms.

MoMA's punctuation—Hope, II—is its current institutional style. Ordinary writing usually omits the comma. Neither version identifies a separate state or duplicate canvas.

One Canvas, Several Documented States

Klimt painted the work in 1907/08, but he did not treat that date as the end of its development. Newspapers reporting on the 1909 Kunstschau described Vision as unfinished. The public first encountered an earlier state of the present MoMA canvas, not a lost preliminary painting.^[2]

Moriz Nähr photographed the work in Klimt's studio in May 1911. His image supplies another secure point in the chronology. Comparison with the surviving surface shows that Klimt later altered the circular form behind the woman's head, leaving a semicircular shape, and reconsidered areas of the background.^[2]

Photographic evidence has limits. A monochrome studio image can establish placement, silhouette and tonal difference; it cannot recover every original colour or date each brushstroke. The changes should therefore be described where comparison is clear without inventing a complete campaign.

By Christmas 1914, the painting had left Klimt's possession for Eugenia Primavesi. Its sale brought the long period of revision to an end. The surviving work is the state acquired then, not a reconstruction of what viewers saw in 1909.^[2]

A Square Built Around Pregnancy

The canvas measures 110.5 centimetres on each side. Within that square, the pregnant figure rises vertically but does not stand with ordinary bodily freedom. Pattern enlarges her garment into a broad central mass, and the lower women create a dense base.^[1]

Her head bends forward. Hair and surrounding ornament frame the face, while closed eyes shift attention away from outward communication. The exposed breast and immense abdomen make pregnancy physically explicit without turning the body into a clinical demonstration.

The hands approach or rest near the belly. Their position can suggest protection, attention or prayer, but the gesture does not prove one state of mind. A bowed head can carry care, fatigue, sorrow, reverence or inward concentration.

Klimt uses the square to join incompatible kinds of space. Face, breast and abdomen retain rounded volume. The garment and surrounding field remain comparatively flat. The woman is bodily present and absorbed into ornament at the same time.

Bowed Head, Exposed Breast

The central woman's downward turn is not a minor expressive detail. It prevents her from functioning as a triumphant emblem displayed frontally to the audience. Her attention appears to remain within the bodily and ritual space of the painting.

The exposed breast complicates that inwardness. It makes maternity, nourishment and sexuality physically present, yet it is not offered through a direct gaze. Klimt places a vulnerable bodily surface beside a head that withholds ordinary social contact.

The garment begins below and around the breast, then enlarges into the dominant patterned mass. As a result, nudity and clothing do not divide the figure into simple natural and decorative halves. Flesh emerges through ornament at the points most charged by pregnancy and nurture.

None of these choices supplies a precise emotion. The woman may be contemplative, sorrowful, prayerful or exhausted. What the pose securely establishes is weight: the head descends, the abdomen projects and the hands gather. Hope is carried as a physical condition rather than announced through a smile or upward gesture.

The Death's Head at the Abdomen

A small human skull appears directly against the pregnant abdomen, within the patterned enclosure. MoMA calls it a death's head and an omen of danger.^[1] Its position is more disturbing than a distant memento mori would be.

The skull does not stand behind the woman as an external threat. It touches the area associated with the unborn child. Birth and mortality are therefore not arranged as separate episodes; Klimt makes them neighbours within one body-shaped field.

This does not depict an actual dead infant. The skull is adult-like and allegorical rather than a medical image. Nor does it diagnose illness, miscarriage or a particular pregnancy outcome. No object-specific record authorises such a narrative.

Its force lies in refusing the idea that hope requires ignorance of death. The pregnant body holds anticipated life, but it cannot secure that life against danger. The image makes vulnerability visible without telling us that catastrophe has already occurred.

Pregnancy Without a Diagnosis

The image can provoke medical questions because pregnancy is so explicit and the skull is so close. Yet Klimt provides no clinical environment, physician, symptom or identified condition. The woman's bowed posture cannot be used to diagnose her.

Nor does the skull function like an anatomical scan of the womb. It belongs to an allegorical tradition in which death's heads remind viewers of mortality. Its insertion into the garment intensifies that tradition by bringing it against pregnancy, but the emblem remains distinct from a depicted foetus.

This boundary protects the range of the painting. A story of miscarriage, maternal illness or dead child would make one tragedy certain and close down the open relation among expectation, fear and ritual attention. The object record does not support that certainty.^[1]

Klimt's subject is embodied rather than medicalised. He makes the danger of life visible at the site of anticipated birth without claiming to show a specific biological event.

Three Women Below

Beneath the central figure, three smaller women bow their heads and raise their hands. Their reduced scale and compressed placement make them appear like a supporting chorus or pedestal.^[1][2]

MoMA leaves room between prayer and mourning. The gestures can also suggest intercession, collective care or ritual attention.^[1] Their exact relation to the pregnant woman is not defined: they are not securely family members, attendants with names or portraits of known individuals.

The uncertainty is productive. If they pray, their hands direct hope towards an outcome. If they mourn, the skull's omen may already dominate their response. If they intercede, they occupy the difficult interval between the two.

They should not be turned into three stages of female life. Nor are they figures carried over from Medicine. Their function is local to this composition: a repeated, bowed human base beneath a monumental pregnancy image.

Scale Within the Group

The lower women are not merely farther away in an ordinary room. Their reduced scale contributes to a hierarchy. The pregnant figure appears icon-like and immense, while the trio gathers beneath her as a compact human response.

This shift allows the central woman to operate simultaneously as person and apparition. Her head is not vastly larger than theirs in isolation, but the expanded patterned body creates a monument that absorbs much of the square. The attendants seem attached to its lower edge.

The arrangement does not make them insignificant. Their repeated heads and hands establish rhythm and give collective form to attention. Without them, the pregnant woman and skull would create a solitary confrontation; with them, vulnerability becomes witnessed.

Because the trio is compressed rather than individually characterised, viewers can project prayer, grief or support onto it. The painting encourages those roles while withholding the narrative details that would distinguish a funeral, vigil or act of intercession.

Pattern as Bodily Architecture

The woman's robe spreads into a field of circles, spirals and repeated colour. It does not simply describe fabric falling over an anatomically complete body. Pattern expands the figure and supplies the composition's central architecture.^[1]

Rounded motifs echo pregnancy without becoming a universal fertility alphabet. Spirals can suggest growth, motion or continuity, but no single key translates every one. Their first job is visual: they make the garment pulse around the calmer zones of face, breast and abdomen.

The lower women occupy this patterned mass rather than a separate perspectival platform. Scale shifts between them and the central figure, helping the picture operate like an icon, apparition or devotional image instead of a naturalistic group in a room.

At the edges, gold and platinum further reduce depth. The central body seems to emerge from and return to a precious surface. Klimt creates monumentality without providing architectural setting.

Oil, Gold and Platinum

MoMA records the medium exactly as oil, gold and platinum on canvas.^[1] Those words should be preserved. The museum does not identify the object simply as oil paint, nor does its record authorise substituting “gold leaf” for “gold”.

Platinum matters because it complicates the impression of one uniformly golden field. Different metals can vary in tone and reflective effect, allowing pale, cool and warm passages to coexist around painted flesh and colour.

The material list is specific to Hope II. It does not include brass, silver, mother-of-pearl, enamel or mosaic components found in other Klimt objects. Decorative richness is not evidence that every material associated with the artist migrated to this canvas.

Metal and oil also create different kinds of light. Painted flesh can be modelled through shadow, whereas the surrounding precious material responds to illumination on the surface. The woman appears volumetric within an environment that keeps declaring its flatness.

A Surface That Changes with Light

Gold and platinum do not behave like a fixed yellow background. Their appearance depends on illumination and viewing position. A surface can brighten, cool or recede as the spectator moves, while the painted body retains more stable modelling.

That optical difference supports the idea of Vision. The environment seems less like a wall behind the figures than a fluctuating condition through which they appear. Precious material gives the shallow field an activity of its own.

Platinum also resists the assumption that Klimt wanted only golden warmth. Its cooler register can separate zones and complicate the atmosphere around the coloured garment. The exact distribution requires direct looking at the object, but the museum's material record confirms that more than one precious substance contributes to the surface.^[1]

This material complexity should not become a universal symbolic code. Gold need not always equal life, nor platinum death. Their securely observable contribution is spatial and optical: they make the field precious, unstable and responsive around painted bodies.

Russian Icons and Wider Decorative Traditions

MoMA compares the flattened clothing and precious ground with Russian icons and places Klimt's decorative language within a broader encounter with Byzantine, Mycenaean, Persian and Japanese art.^[1] A MoMA discussion with a Byzantine-art curator further explores how sacred frontal imagery and metal-rich surfaces can inform the painting's effect.^[7]

These are comparative traditions, not a single source that Klimt copied. The central figure is not an Orthodox icon with a fixed devotional identity, and the lower women do not reproduce one known sacred scene.

The comparison helps explain scale and address. A body can appear monumental without standing in deep space; pattern can signify presence rather than mere clothing; gold can create an environment whose light belongs to the surface.

Klimt combines such possibilities with modern drawing from the nude. The result is neither archaeological revival nor generic “exoticism”. It is a composite decorative language shaped to the problem of pregnancy, threat and communal attention.

Hope, Danger and a Contemporary Reading

The later title encourages viewers to search for hope in the image. Pregnancy offers the clearest basis: a body carries a future not yet visible. The lower women's raised hands may reinforce that expectation through prayer or intercession.

Yet every hopeful element has a counterweight. The central head bows rather than rising in confidence. The skull occupies the bodily enclosure. The women below may mourn. Hope becomes a relation to danger, not a promise that danger will disappear.

The critic Berta Zuckerkandl wrote in 1909 that the work expressed life's victory over illness and death. Her response provides valuable contemporary evidence, especially because she saw the unfinished painting under its original title.^[2]

It remains her interpretation, not Klimt's published programme. The final canvas changed after she wrote, and no surviving statement by the artist explains every figure. The picture can sustain a life-over-death reading without making that victory visually complete.

Hope and the Memento Mori

European memento-mori images place reminders of death within the circumstances of life. Klimt sharpens that principle by locating the skull beside pregnancy, where expectation is most physically concentrated.

The death's head does not cancel the unborn future. If it did, “hope” would become merely ironic. Instead, the two remain held together: new life is possible, and every life is mortal. The lower women give this conjunction a social or ritual response.

The title's optimism is therefore conditional. It asks whether hope can exist with full knowledge of danger, not whether decoration can conceal danger. The skull is too central to be overlooked for long, even when the surrounding colour first attracts the eye.

This reading need not claim a fixed religious doctrine. The icon-like format, raised hands and precious field can evoke devotion, while the painting's subject remains deliberately broader than one creed or rite.

Hope I and the Origin of the Number

Klimt's earlier Hope I dates from 1903. The National Gallery of Canada records it as oil on canvas, 189.2 by 67 centimetres. Its tall format contains a naked upright pregnant woman and a broader assembly of threatening presences.^[3]

Planned public presentation was constrained by contemporary propriety concerns, and the painting was not publicly shown until 1909. At the Internationale Kunstschau it appeared beside the unfinished Vision.^[2][3]

That pairing encouraged the later names Hope I and Hope II. It also made transformation visible. The second work is square rather than narrowly vertical, clothed rather than fully nude, and organised around a death's head embedded near the abdomen and a bowed chorus below.

These differences clarify the later number without making the paintings two panels of one composition. Each is an independent object with its own date, owner history and visual structure.

The 1909 Unfinished Exhibition

Showing Vision unfinished was not the same as displaying a preparatory sketch. The large canvas already possessed its central pregnancy image and symbolic ambition, but contemporary newspapers recognised that work remained.^[2]

Placed beside Hope I, the painting could be understood through repetition and change even before it reached its final state. Viewers saw Klimt return to pregnancy after several years, replacing the earlier exposed vertical figure with a bowed, patterned monument.

The exhibition record also protects the history of the object. “1907–08” identifies the initial painting, while 1909 documents public incompletion. A finished date printed in a catalogue should not erase continued revision.

The title Vision was especially apt for a changing canvas. It allowed the composition to appear as an unresolved symbolic apparition, not a numbered sequel whose meaning had already been fixed by “hope”.

The 1911 Studio Photograph

Moriz Nähr photographed Klimt's studio in May 1911 with Vision visible. The image establishes that the painting still had a larger circular form behind the woman's head and a background different from the surviving state.^[2]

Klimt later reduced the circle to a semicircular element. This altered the relation between head and surrounding field. A complete circle can read more emphatically as nimbus, halo or enclosing disc; the final partial form leaves the association present but less mechanically closed.

The photograph does not tell us the earlier colours. It records tone through a monochrome process and cannot support a detailed palette reconstruction. Nor does it identify exactly when between May 1911 and the 1914 acquisition each revision occurred.

Its value is precise but limited: one date, one visible studio state and clear structural differences. It proves continued work without pretending to observe Klimt making every alteration.

Three Studies, Three Degrees of Relation

Drawings at the Leopold Museum show Klimt developing another pregnancy composition after Hope I. They should be read as a set of alternatives rather than an exact transfer sequence.^[4][5][6]

A 1904/05 blue-crayon standing pregnant nude measures 55.1 by 35.9 centimetres. Seen from the right, the figure differs from the painting in direction and stage of pregnancy. It establishes an early investigation, not the final pose.^[4]

A second 1904/05 sheet, pencil and black chalk on paper, measures 56.2 by 37 centimetres. Its pregnant woman wears a patterned dress, turns in profile, lowers her gaze and brings her hands towards the exposed upper belly. This is the closest of the three to the painted solution.^[5]

A 1907/08 red-and-blue-crayon nude measures 56.1 by 37.1 centimetres. She turns from the left and looks directly outward, with her arms crossed behind her back. Klimt did not adopt that confrontational alternative for the bowed, inward-facing central figure.^[6]

Together the sheets show selection. Clothing, direction, gaze, gesture and pregnancy stage could change independently while Klimt searched for the final relation.

No Identified Sitter

The studies demonstrate work with pregnant models, but they do not name the woman in the painting. No current object record used here identifies a secure sitter.^{[1][2][4][5][6]}

That caution prevents several biographical shortcuts. The image should not be attached without evidence to one of Klimt's partners, children or private bereavements. Pregnancy and mortality are sufficient to generate emotional intensity without a hidden family key.

Nor do the three drawings have to show the same person. Klimt investigated the compositional problem across several years. A final painted body could combine observations and revisions rather than preserve one session as portrait likeness.

Anonymity does not make the figure generic. Her pose and body are specific, but specificity is not the same as recoverable identity.

No Single Biographical Key

Klimt's life included intimate relationships, children and the ordinary exposure to birth and death shared by families around him. Those general facts do not identify the event behind Hope II. No current source used for the object ties the canvas to one pregnancy, loss or confession.

The temptation is understandable. Bowed grief, exposed maternity and a skull seem to promise a private story. But allegory works by giving shared conditions bodily form. A painting can be emotionally exact without transcribing one episode from the artist's life.

The original title Vision supports that openness. It names an apparition rather than a memorial to a named person. The studies likewise show repeated formal inquiry instead of one preserved portrait session.^[2][4][5][6]

Biographical restraint does not make the image impersonal. It keeps attention on the particular visual decisions through which Klimt joined pregnancy, mortality and collective care.

Eugenia Primavesi and the End of Revision

Eugenia Primavesi admired Vision in Klimt's studio. Otto Primavesi acquired it and gave it to her as a Christmas present in 1914. Her note about the gift retained Klimt's original title.^[2]

The transfer matters to the painting's state. While the canvas remained unsold in Klimt's studio, he could return to it across years and exhibitions. Once it entered the Primavesi collection, that prolonged availability ended.

This does not mean every surface was untouched after a ceremonial day in December, but the acquisition provides the secure endpoint for Klimt's documented revision period. The present object represents the painting that left his possession.

Eugenia's continued use of Vision also demonstrates that “Hope II” did not instantly replace the artist's name. Private record and later museum title preserve different stages in the object's cultural life.

A Provenance with an Explicit Gap

MoMA's Provenance Research Project traces the painting from Klimt to Eugenia Primavesi. It then lists the Neue Galerie in Vienna with an important qualification: whether the gallery owned the work or held it on consignment has not been confirmed.^[1]

The later chain includes Hugo Bernatzik, his heirs and Dr Hans Barnas. MoMA acquired the painting in 1978 through Galerie Beyeler.^[1]

The uncertainty at the Neue Galerie should remain visible. A gallery can own a work, broker it or hold it for another party; those relationships are not interchangeable. Filling the gap with an ordinary sale would convert a research question into fact.

This provenance is also distinct from a story of loss or confiscation. The cited record provides a sequence with one acknowledged commercial ambiguity. It does not authorise additional claims about coercion, price or motive at each transfer.

Where Hope II Is Now

The painting belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, object number 468.1978, in the Department of Painting and Sculpture.^[1]

As of 9 August 2026, MoMA's live object record states that it is newly on view on Floor 5.^[1] The date is essential. Museum galleries rotate, works travel and conservation needs can change availability.

Current display confirms that visitors could see the object under the conditions reported that day. It should not be converted into a permanent room promise or used to infer that it has always been displayed.

The collection record remains stable even when gallery status changes. Ownership, object number and medium identify the work; “on view” describes a moment in its public life.

How to Look at Hope II

Begin with scale. The square is over a metre wide, and the central body fills it like a monument. Then separate what is bodily from what is patterned: head, breast and abdomen emerge from a robe that is simultaneously garment and architecture.

Find the skull before interpreting the title. Its closeness to the belly makes mortality a present condition rather than a distant endpoint. Notice that it is an omen inside the enclosure, not a medical illustration.

Move down to the three women. Compare their repeated bowed heads and raised hands, but do not force the group into one action. Prayer, mourning and intercession remain visibly adjacent possibilities.

Finally, look behind the central head. The remaining semicircle is also evidence of revision. The composition's sacred resonance was shaped through change, not delivered unchanged in 1908.

Hope as Vulnerability

Klimt's painting does not oppose a healthy mother to an external personification of Death. It places the death's head against the body that carries new life. Threat has entered the ornamental structure.

Yet the image is not only fatalistic. The pregnant woman remains monumental. Three companions hold their ritual attention below. Colour, pattern and precious material create a field of sustained presence rather than collapse.

Hope therefore becomes neither confidence nor denial. It is the act of carrying a future that cannot be guaranteed. The painting makes that condition bodily: weight, bowing, exposure and enclosure replace a verbal promise.

The original title Vision protects this complexity. The later Hope II guides interpretation, but the changing object continues to show more than the name can settle.

Frequently Asked Questions

References

Accessed August 2026.

1. Museum of Modern Art, New York, “Gustav Klimt, Hope, II,” current title, date, medium, dimensions, object number, visual interpretation, provenance research and dated display status. View source.
2. Gustav Klimt Database, “Gustav Klimt at His Zenith,” Vision/Hope II: original title, unfinished 1909 exhibition, Moriz Nähr's May 1911 photograph, documented revisions, contemporary interpretation, Primavesi acquisition and drawing context. View source.
3. National Gallery of Canada, “Gustav Klimt, Hope I,” separate 1903 oil painting, dimensions, imagery, initial propriety context and first public display in 1909. View source.
4. Leopold Museum, Vienna, “Standing Naked Pregnant Woman from the Right. Study for Hope II (Vision),” 1904/05 blue-crayon sheet, dimensions, date and graded compositional relation. View source.
5. Leopold Museum, Vienna, “Standing Pregnant Woman in Patterned Dress in Profile from the Left. Study for Hope II (Vision),” 1904/05 pencil-and-black-chalk sheet, dimensions and close pose relationship. View source.
6. Leopold Museum, Vienna, “Standing Naked Pregnant Woman from the Left, Her Arms Crossed behind Her Back. Study for Hope II (Vision),” 1907/08 red-and-blue-crayon sheet, dimensions and unrealised direct-gaze alternative. View source.
7. Museum of Modern Art, New York, “Hope, II: The Materials and Sources of Klimt's Ornament,” audio discussion with a Byzantine-art curator, comparative sacred-art and decorative context. View source.

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