Years ago, maybe 10 or 15, my Mother ordered a framed print of a Mother and child. After Sarah was born she would tell me that it reminded her of me and Sarah. She had it in her spare bedroom until the day she gave it to me. This is what it looks like.
I had it on a wall in my bedroom for about a year before I saw the hand [upper left corner.] At first I thought it was creepy, I thought it was a male hand. When I showed it to my Mother, she said she had never noticed the hand.Anyway, after that I had a strong suspicion that the picture was incomplete and it turns out I was right. If anyone [unlike myself] out there knows art, you are probably saying to yourself "hello genius, everybody knows that." Hey, I picked music classes over famous works of art classes in college.
I didn't know the name of the artist or even the title of the piece until very recently. My mystery kept nagging at me and I finally found the clues that led me to the truth. It's Gustav Klimt's The Three Ages of Woman and it's probably a hundred years old.
You can see the full piece here if you scroll down to the second to the last one. It's kind of startling for me to see the whole piece because I have been looking at the partial piece for years and because, well, wholly it is a tad creepy. It makes me want to cry sad and happy tears at the same time. I still think it's beautiful.
After doing a little research on good old Gustav, I have determined that he was a little too freaky for mainstream consumption. I'm not saying that I am mainstream, I'm just not a super-freak, or an art collector for that matter. Some of the tamer ones I think are simply incredible, full of phallic references though they may be. I can handle it.
Other than my own cropped lady, this one is my favorite, The Kiss:
And this one I like too, Garden with Sunflowers:
What gets to me are mostly the bright colors I think, and the mosaic style pulls me in too. The mystery of the hand is now removed from my unsolved mysteries file.
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