Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1907-08

Gustav Klimt

1862–1918 · Austria

Researched by Daniel Bilmes, painter and educator.

Klimt started a portrait with hundreds of graphite and chalk drawings on manila paper, then transferred the main contours to a square canvas by squaring up. He painted the face and hands in conventional academic manner, tonal underpainting and blended glazes, then built the ornamental field outward from the centre with mathematical precision. For the gold passages he raised a pastiglia relief in gesso or lead white, timed an oil-size mordant to a tacky state, and pressed genuine gold, silver, or platinum leaf onto it. Paintings then stayed open in the studio for months or years of adjustment.

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

Every teacher and student below sits on the site-wide teacher-student map.

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.

Questions and answers

What palette did Klimt use?

A restrained academic palette for flesh: lead white, yellow ochre, raw umber, and burnt umber, painted in conventional oil. For landscape he used a chromatic dabbed palette including cobalt blue, emerald green, viridian, cadmium reds, cadmium yellows, and vermilion. The ornamental fields were genuine gold, silver, and platinum leaf laid over an oil-size mordant.

What technique is Klimt known for?

Pastiglia relief under gold leaf. He built raised gesso or lead-white relief beneath the gilding so the finished gold surface caught light from multiple angles instead of sitting flat and dead. He saw the Byzantine mosaics at Ravenna in 1903 and applied the method systematically from the Bloch-Bauer portrait onward.

Who taught Klimt, and whom did he teach?

Klimt trained under Ferdinand Laufberger and Julius Victor Berger at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule from 1876 to 1883, in the historical-muralist idiom of Hans Makart that he later rejected by co-founding the Vienna Secession in 1897. His most important protégé was Egon Schiele: Klimt provided him models, introduced him to the Wiener Werkstätte, and placed his work in the 1909 Kunstschau. Oskar Kokoschka emerged from the same school under the Secessionist atmosphere Klimt had shaped.

How did Klimt start a painting?

With drawing. He produced hundreds of graphite and chalk studies on manila paper for a single portrait, refining silhouette, pose, head angle, and the relationship of figure to ornamental field. The Belvedere holds more than one hundred preliminary drawings for the Bloch-Bauer portrait alone. For landscapes he cropped the composition first through a cardboard viewfinder, a square hole cut in a card.

What would Klimt refuse to do?

He refused to paint a landscape without first cropping it through his viewfinder, and refused a flat gold ground without pastiglia relief. He refused premature finish, keeping paintings open in the studio for months and declaring works unfinished even after exhibition. He destroyed canvases that failed to hold the real and the ornamental in balance.

What did Klimt paint on?

Usually a square-format canvas. The square has no inherent directional bias, so it holds ornament evenly across the surface. Gold passages received a pastiglia relief of gesso or lead white, then an oil-size mordant timed to a tacky state before the leaf was laid and pressed down.

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

Lawrence Alma-Tadema1836–1912

A Dutch-born Victorian archaeologist-painter who built a private library of five thousand annotated photographs of Roman ruins, reconstructed Pompeiian interiors as full studio sets, and brought every square inch of every canvas to the same degree of forensic resolution.

Andrew Wyeth1917–2009

A Brandywine painter who inherited N.C. Wyeth's narrative training but abandoned illustration for egg tempera on gessoed panel, worked the same Pennsylvania farms and Maine houses for seventy years, and built each picture through thousands of cross-hatched tempera strokes over weeks or months.

Artemisia Gentileschi1593–1654

A Baroque painter who ran her own workshops, set the dark brown ground to do the shadow work, and refused to send a drawing before the contract was signed.

William Blake1757–1827

An English Romantic visionary who refused both oil paint and live models, drew the figures he saw in empty chairs as if they were sitting there, and built his own wooden press because the commercial trade was a fetter to genius.

Shared the workbench

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

Lawrence Alma-Tadema1836–1912

Artemisia Gentileschi1593–1654

A Baroque painter who ran her own workshops, set the dark brown ground to do the shadow work, and refused to send a drawing before the contract was signed.

Arnold Böcklin1827–1901

A Swiss Symbolist who refused to paint outdoors — insisting the artist should observe nature intensely but paint only from memory, in a custom emulsion of glue, egg, oil, and resin he commissioned a Florentine pharmacy to produce to his specification.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau1825–1905

A Parisian academic master who ran the studio on a factory schedule (7 a.m. until dark, no lunch break), kept his medium recipes in numbered sketchbooks down to the drop count, and resolved every figure and fold in finished preparatory drawings before a single stroke landed on the final canvas.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder1525–1569

A Flemish master who sketched the Alps on horseback in 1552 and for the rest of his life composed his panel paintings in the studio from a library of those drawings, a set of peasant-wedding field notes, and a habit of "moralizing" every scene through absurdist humor.

Dean Cornwell1892–1960

The "Dean of Illustration" who inherited the Brandywine method through Harvey Dunn, moved to London for five years to apprentice under Frank Brangwyn on the Los Angeles Public Library murals, and taught that the composition had to read as a finished abstract design from thirty feet before any figure reference was brought into the studio.

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.

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