Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1907-08

Gustav Klimt

1862–1918 · Austria

A Vienna Secessionist who rose at 6 a.m., walked the Attersee woods with a cardboard viewfinder to crop nature into flat decorative squares, and built portraits where academically-handled flesh floated inside pastiglia-relief gold backgrounds derived from Ravennan Byzantine mosaic.

ProcessLayered TemperamentImaginative LineageVienna Secession

Signature moves

Carry a cardboard viewfinder to crop the landscape

Walked the Attersee woods with a square hole cut in a card and used it to isolate compositions. Everything he painted as a landscape was cropped first through that square.

Why it matters · The viewfinder is already a two-dimensional frame; the painting inherits its flatness. Painters who never crop the world before painting it import the world's depth uncritically. The square hole is the cleanest case for treating compositional decision as the act of seeing.

Build pastiglia relief under gold leaf

Built raised gesso or lead-white relief under the gilding (pastiglia inherited from Byzantine and early Italian panel painting) so the finished gold surface caught light from multiple angles — a Klimt gold ground feels active rather than dead.

Why it matters · A flat gold ground is a flat passage. Klimt saw the Ravennan mosaics in 1903 and applied the method systematically from the Bloch-Bauer portrait onward. Most painters reach for gilding without the relief and produce inert decoration; the relief is structural.

Belvedere Museum Technical Analysis

Hold academic flesh inside ornamental field

Painted face and hands in conventional academic manner with tonal underpainting and blended glazes — the only passage in a Klimt portrait a nineteenth-century academician would recognize — and surrounded them with mathematically applied ornamental and gold passages.

Why it matters · The structural tension is the point. Painters who run one register across the whole canvas miss the contrast Klimt was after. The naturalistic flesh and the wholly flat ornamental surround coexist on the same surface without either collapsing the other.

Hundreds of preparatory drawings per portrait

Produced hundreds of graphite and chalk drawings on manila paper for a single portrait — the Bloch-Bauer holdings at the Belvedere include more than one hundred preliminary drawings for that one painting.

Why it matters · The drawings are not rehearsal. They are the painting's working reference material — refined silhouette, pose, head angle, relationship of figure to ornamental field. Painters who skip extensive drawing arrive at the canvas with the figure unsettled.

Keep the painting "open" for months

Paintings stayed in the studio for months or years; constantly adjusted weight of a pattern, hue of a gold square, or balance of a silver passage. Declared paintings "unfinished" even after exhibition; destroyed canvases that had failed to hold real and ornamental in balance.

Why it matters · A painting closed early stops developing. Klimt's discipline of leaving works open is the cleanest case for treating finish as a state to be reached, not a deadline to meet.

Skip the morning to study Japanese books

Read Japanese illustrated books through the flat high-noon hour he considered unusable; sometimes missed the morning painting session to study them outside.

Why it matters · A painter's reference reading is part of the practice. Klimt's Japanese collection was the direct source of the flat spatial planes and empty-space compositional logic of his mature portraits. Painters who do not maintain visual study lose the foundation under their own decisions.

Letter to Emilie Flöge from Attersee

In the studio

Photograph of Gustav Klimt, 1912 — Gustav Klimt, photograph, 1912

Studio

Light: Vienna studio (Josefstädter Straße and from 1911 the Hietzing garden pavilion). Summer Attersee in the open landscape.
Position: Standing; long indigo-blue floor-length Reform-dress smock allowing reach across large canvases without binding through the shoulder.
Session length: Up at 6 a.m.; morning light, lunch, Japanese-book study through high-noon hour, return to easel through fading afternoon and dusk.
Tools: Cardboard viewfinder (square hole cut in a card) · Genuine gold, silver, and platinum leaf · Gesso or lead white for pastiglia relief under gilding · Oil-size mordant (timed for tacky state before leaf application) · Hundreds of manila-paper preparatory drawings per portrait · Fine round sable brushes for landscape pointillist-adjacent dabs
Notes: Studio was a working space; commercial Künstler-Compagnie partnership with brother Ernst and Franz Matsch operated through the 1880s and 1890s producing decorative cycles for the Burgtheater and Kunsthistorisches Museum. Co-founded the Vienna Secession in 1897.

Source: Klimt Foundation Archive, Vienna

Palette

Ground: Square-format canvas (no inherent directional bias; holds ornament evenly).
Whites: Lead white
Earths: Yellow ochre · Raw umber · Burnt umber
Colors: Cobalt blue · Emerald green · Viridian · Cadmium reds · Cadmium yellows · Vermilion
Medium: Conventional oil for flesh; oil-size mordant for gilding; gesso/lead white for pastiglia relief.
Quantity: Restrained academic palette for flesh; chromatic dabbed pointillist-adjacent palette for landscape; gold/silver/platinum leaf for ornamental fields.

Source: Belvedere Museum Technical Analysis of the Faculty Paintings

Workflow, from blank canvas

1. Drawing — studies from life on manila paper
Hundreds of graphite and chalk drawings refining silhouette, pose, head angle, relationship of figure to ornamental field.
Why: The drawings are the painting's working reference material, not preparatory rehearsal.
2. Transfer to canvas
Main contours transferred to the (usually square) canvas by squaring or direct copying.
Why: The square holds ornament evenly without directional bias.
3. Flesh block-in (academic)
Face and hands painted in conventional academic manner with tonal underpainting and blended glazes.
Why: The only passage a nineteenth-century academician would recognize. Holds the naturalistic register against the flat ornamental field.
4. Ornamental field
Decorative elements squared up from preliminary drawings and applied with mathematical precision; worked from the centre outward to keep the figure anchored.
Why: The visual density of the pattern can never overwhelm the sitter. Order matters — center first.
5. Gilding
Pastiglia relief built in passages that would receive gold; mordant applied and timed; leaf laid and pressed down.
Why: Timing the mordant is the craft — too wet and the leaf sinks; too dry and it will not adhere. The relief gives the gold its active character.
6. Open adjustment
Paintings stayed in the studio for months or years with constant adjustment of pattern weight, gold hue, silver balance.
Why: A painting closed early stops developing.

Refusals — what they would not do

Refused to paint without first cropping through the viewfinder.
Refused flat gold ground without pastiglia relief.
Refused premature finish — kept paintings "open" for months.
Refused to align with academic Makart historical-muralism — co-founded the Secession against it.

Reference

Primary source: Live sitters in the Hietzing studio for portraits across months. Hundreds of manila-paper drawings as the working record of direct observation.
Photography: Did not work primarily from photographs.

Exceptions

Japanese woodblock prints and illustrated books — primary source of the flat spatial planes and empty-space compositional logic.
1903 Ravenna trip — Byzantine mosaics joined Japan as primary reference and pivoted him into the Golden Phase.
Attersee landscape (viewfinder-cropped direct observation) — painted in the landscape itself and finished in the studio under controlled light.

Lineage

Teachers

Ferdinand Laufberger and Julius Victor Berger · 1876–1883 — Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts). Decorative and architectural training oriented toward the historical-muralist idiom of Hans Makart.

Influences

Hans Makart and the Ringstraße-era Vienna decorative tradition (rejected and broken with).
Japanese woodblock prints and illustrated books.
Ravennan Byzantine mosaic (after the 1903 trip).

Students

Egon Schiele — most important protégé. Klimt provided models, introduced him to the Wiener Werkstätte, placed his work in the 1909 Kunstschau.
Oskar Kokoschka emerged from the same Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule under the Secessionist atmosphere Klimt had shaped.
The Vienna Secession lineage descends through Klimt's two-fold legacy: decorative structure as a primary pictorial element, and line as a carrier of psychological meaning.

In their own words

“I am a painter who paints day in and day out, from morning till evening — figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits.”

— Gustav Klimt, Statement on his own work

“If the weather is good I go into the nearby wood — there I am painting a small beech forest in the sun with a few conifers mixed in.”

— Gustav Klimt, Letter to Emilie Flöge from Attersee

“Sometimes I miss out the morning's painting session and instead study my Japanese books in the open.”

— Gustav Klimt, Letter to Emilie Flöge from Attersee

“Whoever wants to know something about me — they should look attentively at my pictures and there seek to recognize what I am and what I want.”

— Gustav Klimt, Statement, 1912, 1912

Techniques and practices

Gold Leaf over Pastiglia

Metal leaf—gold, silver, platinum—applied over raised gesso or lead-white relief so the metal catches light from multiple angles.

Standing Practice

Painting while standing, on the belief that sitting flattens the energy of the mark and the range of the arm.

Squaring Up from Studies

Transferring a small master sketch to a large canvas via a grid, preserving proportion across scale.

Plein Air, Then Studio

Summer season outdoors collecting etudes and observations, winter season in the studio reconstructing larger finished works from them.

Lead-White Highlights

Reliance on lead white (flake white) for luminous, long-lasting highlights, especially on skin and metal.

If this painter is your match

You believe decoration carries meaning. The pattern is not a frame around the subject; it is part of the subject.

Borrow this: For your next piece, cut a cardboard viewfinder — a square hole, the same proportion as your intended canvas — and walk your actual environment with it. Only paint what you can isolate through that square.

Adjacent painters

Isaac Levitan1860–1900

The Peredvizhniki lyricist who invented the Russian mood landscape by trusting memory over direct observation and finishing paintings by knowing when not to touch them.

Ivan Kramskoy1837–1887

The intellectual strategist of the Peredvizhniki, whose studio ran on analytical silence, early photographic reference, and the conviction that a portrait was a biography rather than a likeness.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau1825–1905

The Parisian academic master who ran his studio on a factory schedule—7 AM until dark, no lunch break—and resolved every figure, every fold, and every leaf in preparatory studies before a single brushstroke landed on the final canvas.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema1836–1912

The Dutch-born Victorian archaeologist-painter who built a private library of five thousand photographs of Roman ruins, reconstructed marble and bronze from the actual excavations at Pompeii, and resolved every canvas as if he were producing forensic evidence that the ancient world looked exactly the way it did.

Shared the workbench

Other researched painters who used at least one of Klimt’s techniques.

Franz von Stuck1863–1928

The Munich "Prince of Art" who designed every element of the Villa Stuck as a total work of art, painted his mythological subjects in a custom tempera-grassa emulsion, and designed the frame for every painting as architectural integration rather than ornament.

Ilya Repin1844–1930

The Peredvizhniki history painter and portraitist who worked from zenith-lit studios, standing, from long social sittings, and painted monumental scenes from years of field observation.

John Singer Sargent1856–1925

The late-nineteenth-century portraitist who worked in sight-size from a north-lit London studio, standing, in pure oil color without medium—placing each mark from six to twelve feet away and scraping the canvas to the ground when a passage failed.

Anders Zorn1860–1920

The Swedish virtuoso who painted standing in north-lit studios from a four-color palette, built transparency into his darks through red-and-black washes, and resolved skin tones by painting the transition between light and shadow rather than blending it.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau1825–1905

Joaquín Sorolla1863–1923

The Valencian who carried three-yard canvases onto the beach, braced them against the wind with ropes, and painted the transient Mediterranean sun directly—in pure oil color, thick in the lights, thin in the shadows, at the speed the light demanded.

Primary sources

Gustav Klimt, Letters to Emilie Flöge (1902–1917), 1917. Principal first-person archive of Klimt's daily working life. More than four hundred surviving letters and postcards.
Ludwig Hevesi, Acht Jahre Sezession, 1906. Contemporary critic and chronicler of the Vienna Secession. Reviews of Secession exhibitions including the 1903 Eighteenth Exhibition.
Belvedere Museum Technical Analysis of the Faculty Paintings. Vienna Belvedere conservation research on the destroyed Faculty Paintings and surviving studies. Documents Klimt's transitional technique into the Golden Phase.
Klimt Foundation Archive, Vienna. Central modern archive of Klimt's letters, drawings, photographs, and studio documentation.