Water Serpents I is a mixed-media on parchment painting by Gustav Klimt.
In 1903, a year before Gustav Klimt painted Water Serpents I, the artist was visiting Italy and was awed by the early Christian mosaics that incorporated an amalgamation of symbols, patterns, gold leaf filigree, and stark, sharp brushstrokes. The style was to influence him for the rest of his life and, along with his fascination with Byzantine devotional icons, would inform the genesis of his Gold period, of which Water Serpents I was an early hint. Like Klimt's Mother and Child and Goldfish, Water Serpents I features angular, distorted gestural movements, with aquatic female forms jostling for position amid the ornamental reeds and riverbed, craning their bodies into an embrace. A playful game of tactility and depth, Klimt's painting is no reproduction of a mythical dream, but a journey across —and between— surfaces.
The painting is currently on display at the Österreichische Galleria in Vienna, Austria
Water Serpents I provides examples of:
- Art Nouveau: Indicative of the movement, the imagery is all done in fluid organic shapes meant to evoke plant and water imagery, indicated by the various plants, waves of water and water animals compared to the forms of the two women.
- Artistic Licence – Anatomy: The arms of one of the women are thinner and more angular compared to the rest of the body. The hands are also more curved than normal hands are.
- Homoerotic Subtext: Cited by many as one of the first depictions of Sapphism on Modern Art, scholars have read it in a more nebulous, primordial sense, the women portrayed as hermaphroditic in nature and therefore "presexual".
- Water Is Womanly: Drawn in fluid organic shapes composed of water imagery, with waves and the aquatic forms of two women.
