He wore a big monocle in one eye and looked me sedately up and down without saying anything! That was rather unsettling. Finally he said to me: “What do you want to come to me for? You have just had your portrait done by a very good painter.”
I was afraid that he was going to turn me down and so I answered quickly that, yes, this was certainly true, but that through Klimt I wanted to be made immortal, and he accepted that.(qtd Whitford 131)
Portrait of Friederike Maria Beer (1914)
So related Friederike Maria Beer. She was the daughter of the owner of the most fashionable Viennese nightclubs at the time and had an equally wealthy boyfriend as well, who was an heir to a steel magnate. A young woman with an unconventional, even masculine face, her strong jaw and pronounced black eyebrows were indeed, “quite different from that of most of the women Klimt was usually asked to portray” (Whitford 131).
Accustomed to seeing painters like van Gogh who are underappreciated in his time and live an impoverished life, we are naturally inclined to think that Klimt should have been glad to paint a portrait of this young society girl. But Klimt was no starving artist: like the commission of no less than 20,000 crowns he received—Schiele received mere 600—Klimt was “Vienna’s painter prince.” Socialites, or rather their powerful husbands, flocked to him to have their portrait done. 
Like the first Adele Bloch-Bauer portrait shows, Klimt excelled at painting these women in all their glory: beautiful, elegant, slim, and richly swathed in gold paint that shows off their husbands’ wealth, these women—or rather, their likenesses—became the status symbol and a trophy for any Viennese bourgeois. Klimt’s objectification of the upper class women, then, has its roots even far back as this famous gold period work.
That day, however, when young Friederike came to ask Klimt to paint her, she was not concerned with this idea. More likely she wished simply to be portrayed as a stunning beauty like Klimt’s other women; for, she had indeed had her portrait done merely a year before by another of Vienna’s most treasured artists: Egon Schiele (see above left). The risk that Schiele took with the pose alone is striking enough, but it is the intensity of the artist’s emotion that we admire the most in this painting. Jane Kallir writes in Gustav Klimt Egon Schiele: “The most profound difference between Klimt and Schiele occurs in the emotional content of their work. Schiele not only digs deeply into the psychological depths of his sitters, but lays bare his own anguish in a plethora of self-portraits” (Kallir 25). It is precisely this penetrating reflection that we see and admire in his paintings, and the Portrait of Friederike Maria Beer is no exception. As a painting the work is magnificent. Friederike, however, likely was dissatisfied with the twisted figure and sallow complexion of her first portrait, and as a result sought out Klimt, who was capable of making any woman appear appealing. In direct contrast to the beauty and vividity of the outside, however, Klimt’s women are empty of inner world, and “do not display very vibrant personalities” (25). Klimt’s portrait of Friederike turned out to be just such: extremely vibrant and decorative on the outside but devoid of inner expression of both the sitter and the artist, it is a foil to Schiele’s poignant and deeply personal portrayal. Nevertheless, Klimt’s gift of creating a sheer visual feast cannot be grudged, and his portrait of Friederike surpassed the former one in fame and popularity. In the end, like Friederike predicted, it was Klimt who immortalized her.