More about Mäda Primavesi

  • All
  • Info
  • Shop

Contributor

If only we all had Mäda Primavesi’s kind of confidence when we were nine years old… or twenty years old, or any age really.

Mäda​ Primavesi was the daughter of Otto and Eugenia Primavesi. They were ardent supporters of the arts at the time and became the main patrons of Wiener Werkstätte, a collective of visual artists in Vienna of which Gustav Klimt was a part. He painted both Mäda and her mother during their stays in Vienna, despite the fact that painting kids wasn’t really his thing.

Mäda’s posture connotes the self-esteem of an unamused billionaire CEO. In this way Klimt is actually pretty feminist. Besides the fact that he painted pretty much exclusively women and had sex with many of them (except for maybe this one), he depicted the women in his paintings as strong and confident despite the patriarchal time period in which they lived. Four for you Gustav! You go Gustav!

You can imagine that he would have been a good father because of this encouragement. We would hope so too because he had so darn many children, no one could keep up. We do have some evidence of Klimt’s nurturing tendencies in the form of Mäda Primavesi’s memories. She was probably the last living muse of Klimt (until 2000 when she died) and she remembers Klimt being very nice and patient with her. And when she asked Klimt to write something in a book of hers, he wrote, “The day is like night unless I see you. I am happier if I dream about you.” *swoon* No wonder he had so many babies… he was a DILF.

 

Sources