Mada Primavesi was a child who had everything: The daughter of Otto Primavesi, she lived a fairy-tale existence in her parents' remote Moravian Villa. Klimt's portrait, with its blended pinks and whites, is both an accurate reflection of the subject's charmed life and a sympathetic portrait of a very real and somewhat willful little girl. Though he seemed to understand children well, Klimt rarely painted them. Mada remembered him as a kindly fellow, who understood the ten-year-old's desire to move-about and did not insist (as had a different painter for whom she sat) that she remain absolutely still. Klimt was himself rather childlike, enjoying dropping paper hats from the window of the Floge fashion salon and watching them alight on the heads of unsuspecting strangers below. In this work, the inherent conflict between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional has been softened by a wiser application of pigment. Mada is not trapped in the surface (as were Klimt's gilded icons); she blends organically into it. Furthermore, the space in which she stands is not quite so airless as that in the mosaic portraits. The pink backdrop could be read as either a wall or the sky; the flowers on the putative "horizon" might be real or part of a carpet pattern. The white, triangular surface upon which she stands, suggests spatial depth while remaining manifestly two-dimensional. A similar device would later be used in "Portrait of the Baroness Elisabeth-Echt." Echoed by Mada's stance, this triangular shape strikes an intriguing balance between foreground and background, focusing attention very sharply on the subject. The Primavesi portrait is, in many ways, more accomplished and successful than much of the artist's earlier work.
