Entry Nine: Echoes of Philosophy
This week I wanted to reflect on the second of the three lost paintings that form the heart of my Ghosts of the Ice project. Last time, I wrote about Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee , a painting swallowed by chaos and sea. This time, it is Gustav Klimt’s Philosophy, lost not to water but to fire. And still to come will be Matisse’s Reading Girl in White and Yellow, a softer vanishing, more domestic, yet no less haunting.
In 1900, Gustav Klimt completed what would become one of his most enigmatic works: Philosophy, a monumental painting commissioned for the Great Hall of the University of Vienna. For Klimt it was never simply an academic task. He transformed the brief into something vast, probing the edge between knowledge and mystery. On the left, a dense mass of humanity: births, lives, decay. On the right, a globe of shadow and light. Somewhere emerging from it all, a figure of knowledge, suspended in thought. What looked like triumph was uneasy, unresolved, a dream caught between beauty and fear.
Philosophy, 1900-1907 by Gustav Klimt
When Philosophy was unveiled, the reaction was not admiration but outrage. Critics called it immoral, chaotic, even dangerous. It did not celebrate reason as the university had hoped, but exposed the futility of understanding in the face of existence. It was life without explanation, a truth that frightened those who wanted certainty.
During the Second World War, Philosophy and its sister works, Medicine and Jurisprudence, were stored in Schloss Immendorf, a castle in Lower Austria. In May 1945, as the war collapsed, the castle burned. The paintings were destroyed in the fire, consumed by the same elemental force Klimt once used to illuminate his gilded surfaces. What remains today are sketches, photographs, and silence, fragments of an idea that refused to survive.
I include Philosophy in Ghosts of the Ice because its loss is more than historical. It is existential. Klimt’s work was about the human search for meaning, and it ended the same way many of our questions do, unanswered, unfinished, consumed by forces beyond control. The Arctic mirrors that story. It too is a record of impermanence, of systems that dissolve, of beauty that burns out not in flames but in thaw.
When I think about Philosophy, I imagine standing before a glacier, its face fractured, its center unknowable, and realizing that knowledge and mystery are the same thing viewed from different distances. Klimt tried to paint that realization. Nature performs it daily.
On the Rembrandt van Rijn, as we move through drifting ice and open water, I will carry the ghost of this painting with me. Not to recreate it, but to continue its conversation. I want to see what happens when a work that once burned is reimagined through a medium that fades with warmth, a transformation that turns tragedy into metaphor. If fire erased Klimt’s vision, perhaps heat, in its gentler form, can help us see what he meant all along.
Art and ice share the same fate. They are both records of time, vulnerable to the very forces they depict. My version of Philosophy will vanish slowly, color by color, as the temperature rises, not as an act of destruction, but as a mirror held to the world. What disappears is not the end; it is the revelation.
Next week, I’ll turn to the third and final painting in this series, Henri Matisse’s Reading Girl in White and Yellow (1919). Unlike Rembrandt’s chaos or Klimt’s cosmic vision, Matisse offers something quieter: a moment of stillness, a pause between thoughts. It is a painting about light, intimacy, and contemplation, the calm after the storm and the fire. Where Rembrandt and Klimt confronted the vastness of existence, Matisse reminds us of the human scale, the fragile ordinary that endures when everything else falls away.
“Art is the highest form of hope.”
