Klimt's women: more feared than loved?

Pornography and women's liberation: It is an incongruous coupling, but one that characterizes the artistic output of Gustav Klimt.

The painter and designer was well-known for his ambivalent relations with women -- and at his death he was discovered to have fathered no fewer than 14 illegitimate children by his models and other women. Throughout his career Klimt never did self-portraits, shied away from historical works and only occasionally indulged in the odd landscape. Mostly, he painted women.

These works form the heart of "Gustav Klimt and Images of Women, Vienna 1900," now showing at the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art in Kobe. As this is a themed exhibition, however, a number of works by Klimt's contemporaries are also displayed: Egon Schiele's masterful "The Embrace," paintings by Oskar Kokoschka, canvases by Max Oppenheimer and a host of works by lesser-known artists, including the female painters Elena Luksch-Makowsky and Alois Delug.