Music

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About Music

Gustav Klimt's Music is small enough to be approached like a cabinet picture, yet it was conceived in relation to an architectural interior. A young woman bends towards a kithara in a shallow horizontal field. A dark, Pan-like mask presses in from the left; a sphinx-like form occupies the right. Vines, grapes and rounded offerings complicate the quiet attention of the player. Music appears neither simply soothing nor purely ecstatic, but poised between measured form and forces that resist explanation.^[1]

The surviving work is Die Musik, painted in 1895 and held by the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen as inventory 8195. Its exact medium is oil and gold bronze on canvas. The painted image measures only 27.5 by 35.5 centimetres, while the museum records an outer measurement of 37.2 by 45.1 centimetres.^[1]

This Munich painting must be distinguished from a larger work that no longer survives. It served as a painted design for an overdoor commissioned for Nicolaus Dumba's music room in Vienna. Klimt executed the architectural version in 1897/98. That final overdoor was destroyed in the fire at Schloss Immendorf in May 1945. The coloured surface visible today belongs to the earlier design, not to a reconstruction of the lost interior painting.^[3][4][8]

At a Glance

• ArtistGustav Klimt
• Current titleDie Musik (Music)
• Functional title used in scholarshipMusic (Study) or painted design for the Dumba overdoor
• Date1895
• Object typeSurviving painted design
• MediumOil and gold bronze on canvas
• Image dimensions27.5 × 35.5 centimetres
• Outer dimensions37.2 × 45.1 centimetres
• Signature or inscriptionNone published in the live object record
• Inventory number8195
• ModelUnidentified
• Commission contextDesign for a later overdoor in Nicolaus Dumba's music room
• Current collectionBayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen – Neue Pinakothek
• Current displayThe live record updated in June 2026 placed it in the Alte Pinakothek, ground floor, Room I, display case; visitors should check for changes^[1][2]

Which Music Is This?

The exact surviving object is the Munich painting titled Die Musik. The Pinakothek dates it to 1895, identifies oil and gold bronze on canvas and assigns inventory number 8195. Its image is wider than high, 27.5 by 35.5 centimetres, with an outer measure of 37.2 by 45.1 centimetres. The larger dimensions describe the object as presently measured from the outside; they should not automatically be called an original Klimt frame.^[1]

The Gustav Klimt Database calls the same work Music (Study). In this context “study” describes its relation to a later architectural painting. It does not mean that the Munich surface is unfinished, a fragment cut from the overdoor or one among several surviving painted states.^[3]

Nor is inventory 8195 a print. Photographs and reproductions of the design may circulate widely, but their papers and processes do not change the canvas's material. The museum does not publish a signature for the object, so no inscription should be supplied from a differently titled work.

Several other Klimt projects involved music, musicians or theatrical allegory. Earlier decorative work, a music-and-theatre poster and the later Beethoven Frieze are independent objects with different functions and materials. The short title Music is not sufficient to merge them.

Oil and Gold Bronze—not Gold Leaf

The Munich catalogue gives the German medium as Öl und Goldbronze auf Leinwand: oil and gold bronze on canvas. “Gold bronze” is the institution's object-specific term. It should neither be simplified to gold leaf nor expanded into an unverified recipe of copper, zinc, powder, foil or alloy.^[1]

At this compact scale, metallic-looking passages contribute to the relation between ornament and painted figure. Their reflective or luminous effect can make the design feel less like an opening into ordinary space and more like a deliberately worked surface. Yet the material record alone does not reveal Klimt's application sequence or the present conservation condition.

The date is important. Metallic accent appears here well before the sustained use of precious and reflective materials associated with Klimt's Golden Period. The connection shows that he was already testing how a non-naturalistic surface could organise an image. It does not make Music a gold-leaf painting or an embryonic version of every later work.

Represented objects remain paint as well. Vines, instrument, mask, cakes and costume are not applied plants, wood, stone, food or textile. Their physical substance within the surviving object is governed by the exact oil-and-gold-bronze record.

A Design for Nicolaus Dumba's Music Room

Nicolaus Dumba was an industrialist, politician, collector and major patron of musical and artistic life in Vienna. He assembled important material relating to Franz Schubert and made his Parkring residence a setting for art, music and sociability. Klimt Database research identifies him as a patron whose commissions joined established Viennese prestige with newer artistic approaches.^[4][8]

Around 1893, Dumba engaged Gustav Klimt and Franz Matsch for decorative work in the palace. Klimt's contribution to the music room eventually included two overdoors, Music and Schubert at the Piano. The room's function gives the allegory a specific architectural purpose: it was not devised for a university ceiling, a concert poster or a freestanding public mural.^[4][6]

The interval between commission and execution mattered. Klimt Database research dates the order to 1893 but places architectural planning and implementation four years later. During that period Klimt's work moved rapidly away from the historicist language that had established his professional reputation. The patron therefore received a scheme shaped by artistic changes that were still unfolding while the room was delayed.^[4]

Klimt's task extended beyond supplying two isolated canvases. Surviving material shows him planning doors, internal elevations and the ceiling as parts of the music room. The Munich painting should not be mistaken for one of those architectural drawings, but this wider activity explains why the overdoor's shape, direction and decorative field had to answer an interior rather than an easel alone.^[4][6]

An overdoor, or supraporte, belongs above an opening and must act within the proportions, movement and furnishings of a room. The surviving design's horizontal format suits that destination, but its small size should not be used to calculate the dimensions of the final painting. A proposal can establish composition and atmosphere without enlarging through a simple mechanical ratio.

The commission also links subject and use. A personification of Music entered a room intended for listening, collecting and conversation. That correspondence does not reduce the image to a decorative label. The unsettling mask and hybrid form complicate the cultured harmony a patron might expect from the room's name.

The second overdoor, Schubert at the Piano, formed a distinct partner. It presented a different scene, with the composer and listeners, and followed its own design history. Mentioning it clarifies the two-part architectural programme; its figures, lighting and compositional evidence do not belong to the Munich Music.

The Kithara Player

At the centre, a young female figure inclines towards a stringed instrument. The Pinakothek identifies her as a personification of Music and calls the instrument a kithara, the formal lyre associated with ancient Greek performance. The strict profile of its arms and strings gives the composition a clear internal framework.^[1]

Her attention appears withdrawn from the viewer. She does not perform outwardly for an audience arranged in the picture, and she does not meet our gaze. “Absorbed” or “meditative” describes this visible relation between head, hands and instrument; it does not identify a psychological condition or a private memory.

No model is named. The woman's youth, long hair and profile cannot securely turn her into a singer known to Dumba, a member of Klimt's circle or a classical Muse with a fixed name. The personification works because figure, action and instrument converge, not because portrait identity has been recovered.

The kithara is more than a prop. Its geometry creates a measured zone within a field crowded by organic and fantastic forms. It makes ordered music visible through tensioned strings and repeated uprights, while the player's curved body and hair soften that structure.

The Pinakothek relates the instrument to ancient vase imagery. This is a source tradition rather than an identification of one exact vase that Klimt copied. Antiquity supplies a vocabulary that he could reorganise for a modern Viennese interior.^[1]

Mask and Sphinx-like Form

The face at the left is not another ordinary participant. The Pinakothek describes it as a grotesque, Pan-like mask. Its broad features and proximity to the player introduce an intrusive register beside her concentrated pose.^[1]

“Pan-like” retains the museum's caution. The form may evoke the rustic god, ecstatic music or unruly appetite without proving that it represents Pan in a narrated myth. It should not be renamed Silenus, a portrait, Death or a theatre character on resemblance alone.

On the opposite side, the museum recognises a sphinx-like figure and links it to music's enigmatic or rationally unfathomable character. Again, the suffix matters. “Sphinx-like” describes a hybrid visual association; it does not identify one Egyptian monument, Greek episode or universal emblem.^[1]

These lateral presences frame the musician with different kinds of uncertainty. The kithara offers a visibly organised instrument. Mask and hybrid creature suggest that musical experience can exceed order, language or rational account. The painting sustains that tension rather than selecting one side.

Vines, Grapes and Round Offerings

Vine growth and grapes appear within the design, introducing a second ancient association. The Pinakothek connects them with Dionysus and identifies the round forms as cakes offered in Dionysian sacrifice. It consequently reads the composition through a relation between Apollonian and Dionysian principles.^[1]

The Apollonian side is associated with the kithara, clarity and measured form; the Dionysian side with vine, offering and ecstasy. This institutional interpretation helps explain why a seemingly quiet musician is accompanied by such strange elements. It is not a universal Klimt code in which every stringed instrument means reason or every grape means abandon.

Nor does the sacrificial-cake reading establish that a ritual is taking place in Dumba's salon. The forms operate within an allegorical design. Their significance derives from scholarly comparison with ancient visual and religious traditions, not from evidence that the painted figure is performing a documented ceremony.

The contrast is also formal. Straight strings meet curling plant growth; the absorbed player is positioned between a grotesque face and a hybrid presence; metallic accent interrupts ordinary colour. Klimt makes philosophical opposition perceptible through shape before it becomes a verbal programme.

A Small Surface for a Larger Interior

The design's dimensions demand close looking. At 27.5 by 35.5 centimetres, the painted area is smaller than many of Klimt's paper studies and radically smaller than an architectural overdoor. Its concentration is part of its character.^[1]

Forms are compressed instead of dispersed across a panoramic field. The musician, kithara and lateral motifs occupy nearly the whole image. Space behaves as a designed interval among signs rather than as a room in which bodies move freely.

That compression served planning. A small painting could coordinate colour, value and the relation of principal motifs before Klimt executed a composition for the wall. But “design” does not make every mark provisional. The Munich work was preserved, exhibited and purchased as an object in its own right.^[1][5]

Its later museum life confirms that independence. Viewers in Munich could see the design while the completed architectural painting existed elsewhere. The history of display thus provides evidence that two related works coexisted rather than forming successive states of one canvas.

What Changed in the Executed Overdoor?

The larger Music was not a mechanical enlargement of the 1895 design. Klimt Database scholarship, working from surviving photographs and reproductions, describes its motifs as more clearly defined. The kithara player turns away, rests the instrument on a low wall, and appears against ornament that occupies the full pictorial field.^[4]

Those changes alter the balance of the image. In the small design, softer transitions help figure and fantastic presences occupy an uncertain atmosphere. In the executed work, the wall-like support and fuller ornament make the player participate in a flatter architectural band. The development belongs to Klimt's broader movement from diffuse, post-Impressionist effects towards a more planar Jugendstil language.^[4]

Documentary evidence must nevertheless remain documentary. Monochrome photographs can support placement, direction and the relative spread of ornament. They cannot reproduce the lost painting's colour, gold effects, exact texture or condition. The current Munich canvas supplies its own historic colour surface, not a recovered palette for the overdoor.

The final Music appeared at the Vienna Secession's first exhibition in 1898, where contemporary press coverage paid it relatively little attention. That quiet reception should not be rewritten as rejection. It identifies a public presentation of the installed version's era while leaving the 1895 design's separate exhibition and purchase history intact.^[4]

One Exact Study and a Wider Drawing Project

Wien Museum inventory 74930/121 is securely associated with Music I for the Dumba salon. Dated 1895, the drawing shows a standing female nude with long hair in left profile. Klimt used pencil on paper; the sheet measures 44.6 by 31.9 centimetres and is catalogued as Strobl or GKZ 288.^[7]

The profile and vertical figure search illuminate work on the project, but the sheet is not a one-to-one cartoon for the small Munich composition. Its standing body differs from the concentrated relation between player and instrument visible in the oil. Association can be exact even when pose and function are not mechanically identical.

The Albertina's Dumba group brings together several drawings made across 1895–98. A later female figure for “Music II,” dated 1898, belongs to continued development towards the installed decoration. Its date does not prove that inventory 8195 was repainted in 1898 or that the figure lies hidden beneath the present surface.^[6]

No fixed total is needed. Institutional groups can evolve as catalogues identify or reassess connections. The secure conclusion is that Klimt investigated the commission through multiple drawings while the Munich painting preserves one early, resolved colour design.

Design in Munich, Overdoor in Dresden

The eighth International Art Exhibition opened in Munich's Glaspalast in 1901. Klimt displayed the surviving Music design there. At the same time, the completed Dumba overdoor was on loan to an exhibition in Dresden.^[5]

That separation is exceptionally useful. One object did not travel from Munich to Dresden under two descriptions. The small 1895 design was in Munich; the later architectural painting was in Dresden. Their simultaneous display establishes related but independent identities.

The Bavarian collection acquired inventory 8195 directly from Klimt during the Munich exhibition. Klimt Database research records that officials had first considered buying Judith I, which was already sold, and selected Music (Study) instead. The institutional purchase was not part of Dumba's private payment for the music-room overdoor.^[1][5]

That sequence also clarifies title and ownership. Klimt could sell the small design to a public collection because it was a separate canvas, while Dumba retained the architectural work made for his palace. “From the artist” describes the museum's immediate seller in 1901; it does not make Klimt the owner of the completed overdoor at the same date or turn the Munich acquisition into a transfer of the whole commission.

Acquisition changed the design's public life. A work generated by a Viennese interior commission entered a Munich museum collection as a self-sufficient painting. Its scale and preparatory function were not obstacles to sustained exhibition and study.

What Was Destroyed at Immendorf?

The completed overdoors Music and Schubert at the Piano were destroyed in the fire at Schloss Immendorf in May 1945. Period photographs and reproductions document those lost works, but neither original architectural painting survives.^[4][8]

The sentence “Klimt's Music was destroyed” is therefore dangerously incomplete. The 1897/98 overdoor was lost; the 1895 Munich design survives. Inventory 8195 is not a postwar facsimile, digital recolourisation or reconstruction.

The distinction also limits what can be claimed about the final room. The Munich surface provides strong evidence for an earlier compositional proposal, while historical photographs can document aspects of the installed work. The current colour, exact material and dimensions of the surviving design cannot simply be transferred to the destroyed overdoor.

This loss differs from the destruction of Klimt's University Ceiling Paintings, which had another commission, ownership history and documentary problem. A shared place of destruction does not make separate works one provenance narrative.

Where Is Music Displayed?

The painting belongs to the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen and is assigned to the Neue Pinakothek collection. The Neue Pinakothek building is closed for major renovation, with reopening planned for 2029. Selected works from its holdings are being shown elsewhere.^[1][2]

The live object record, last updated on 22 June 2026, marked Music as displayed at “AP EG → Saal I → Vitrine”: the Alte Pinakothek, ground floor, Room I, in a display case. That location was current when checked in August 2026, not a permanent promise.^[1]

The apparent contradiction—Neue Pinakothek collection, Alte Pinakothek display—reflects the temporary closure rather than a transfer of ownership. Visitors should consult the live record and current visitor information before travelling, because rotations and renovation arrangements can change.

Why Music Matters

Music joins three different scales of thought. It is a minute, materially specific painting; a proposal for an architectural overdoor; and an allegory of an art that moves between discipline and ecstasy.

The young kithara player supplies concentration. Vine, mask and sphinx-like presence prevent concentration from becoming serenity alone. Gold bronze contributes a non-naturalistic accent without converting the work into a gold-leaf painting. The horizontal format makes these elements operate as a compressed band suited to an architectural destination.

Its survival is equally revealing. The overdoor for Dumba's room was destroyed, while the smaller design entered a museum during Klimt's lifetime. The surviving work is valuable not merely because it resembles something lost, but because it achieved an independent identity through exhibition, purchase and continued viewing.

Klimt presents music as an organised practice shadowed by what organisation cannot contain. The kithara has strings and structure; the allegory around it has vines, appetite, mask and enigma. That unresolved relation gives the small design an imaginative reach far beyond its dimensions.

Frequently Asked Questions

References

Accessed August 2026.

1. Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Collection Online, “Die Musik”: exact title, 1895 date, oil-and-gold-bronze medium, image and outer dimensions, inventory 8195, iconographic account, 1901 acquisition and current display field. View source.
2. Pinakothek, “Visit”: current Neue Pinakothek renovation closure, planned reopening and temporary presentation of selected nineteenth-century works in the Alte Pinakothek. View source.
3. Gustav Klimt Database, “Symbolism in Klimt's Oeuvre”: Music (Study) identity, 1895 date, Symbolist transition and orientation to the Dumba commission. View source.
4. Gustav Klimt Database, “Cradle of Modernism”: Palais Dumba commission, development of the two overdoors, surviving oil designs and loss of the installed paintings. View source.
5. Gustav Klimt Database, “The Golden Knight and Femmes Fatales”: the 1901 Munich and Dresden exhibitions, distinction between design and completed overdoor, and Bavarian acquisition of Music (Study). View source.
6. Albertina, Digital Publications, “Palais Dumba”: distinction among the palace rooms, destroyed overdoors, painted designs and surviving drawings across the commission. View source.
7. Wien Museum, Online Collection, “Stehender Mädchenakt mit langen Haaren im Profil nach links”: inventory 74930/121, exact 1895 pencil-on-paper medium, dimensions, catalogue number and association with Music I for the Dumba salon. View source.
8. Gustav Klimt Database, “Nicolaus Dumba”: patron's political, musical and collecting roles, the Parkring commission, two overdoors and their destruction at Immendorf. View source.

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