Metamorphoses

In 1897, motivated to lead Austrian art from its cultural cul-de-sac , Klimt started to work not only on his programmatic works but also on Portrait of Sonja Knips (1898). From the outset, this canvas was marked as a watershed in Klimt's portraiture, although what made it significant and innovative has not been explicitly articulated. Notably, the portrait also signifies Klimt's complete conversion to Japonisme , a feature that has gradually dawned on art historians albeit without any specificity as to possible Japanese sources of inspiration. Extending and sharpening previous analyses of the portrait that have increasingly stressed the importance of Japonisme , this chapter highlights the numerous parallels between Klimt's Portrait of Sonja Knips and Itō Jakuchū's Golden Pheasant and Bamboo in Snow (1771) which, as the chapter argues, was a key source underlying its conception and execution. Jakuchū's elegance of lines, richness of colors, and harmonious distribution of forms, placed against a pitch-black background, likely resonated with Klimt tout de suite . The chapter explains that in the portrayal of Sonja Knips, as in Poster for the I Secession Exhibition and some later works, Klimt repeatedly and successfully utilized the metamorphosing mode, in which Klimt creatively transformed a variety of Eastern and Western cultural stimuli.