Gustav Klimt

Klimt kept an almost monastic daily schedule. He rose at 6:00 AM and began the day with a walk—through the woods around Attersee in the summer, or through Vienna to his Josefstädter Straße studio and later to the Hietzing garden pavilion he worked in from 1911 onward. He carried a simple cardboard viewfinder, a square hole cut in a card, and used it to isolate compositions from the tangle of the forest. Everything he painted as a landscape, he cropped first through that square hole. It is one reason his landscapes read as flat decorative surfaces rather than as three-dimensional spaces—the viewfinder is already a two-dimensional frame, and the painting inherits its flatness.

He worked in a long, indigo-blue floor-length smock—the Reform-dress garment his partner Emilie Flöge also wore in her Vienna fashion house—which let him reach across large canvases without binding through the shoulder. He painted standing. The ornamental patterns of the portraits required constant stepping back to judge the balance of pattern against flesh, and he worked through that rhythm for the length of a standing working day.

In Vienna the schedule ran painting in the morning light, lunch, reading Japanese illustrated books through the flat high-noon hour he considered unusable, and a return to the easel through the fading afternoon and dusk. At Attersee—where he spent every summer from 1900 onward with the Flöge family—the schedule shifted with the weather: bright days for the lake and the poplars, overcast days for the forest interior paintings, with the viewfinder dictating the motif either way.

Klimt's Golden Phase—approximately 1902 to 1911, from the Beethoven Frieze through the Bloch-Bauer portrait to Judith II—is defined by the chemical interaction of oil painting and metal leaf. He worked in a conventional oil technique for the flesh passages and applied genuine gold, silver, and occasionally platinum leaf over oil-based grounds for the ornamental surrounds. The gilding used an oil-size mordant—a slow-drying adhesive applied to the specific areas that would receive leaf, left until it reached a precise tacky state, then covered with the leaf and pressed down. Timing the mordant is the craft: too wet and the leaf sinks and loses its reflective surface; too dry and the leaf will not adhere.

Under the leaf he built raised relief in gesso or lead white—the pastiglia technique inherited from Byzantine and early Italian panel painting. He saw the actual Ravennan mosaics in 1903 and applied the method systematically from the Bloch-Bauer portrait onward. Because the pastiglia under the leaf has physical relief, the finished gold surface is not flat—it catches light from multiple angles, which is why a Klimt gold ground feels active rather than dead. The effect is a direct translation of the way Byzantine tesserae catch candlelight in a darkened church.

For the naturalistic flesh passages the palette was restrained and academic: lead white, yellow ochre, vermilion, raw and burnt earths, thin blended glazes that look like Bouguereau would look if Bouguereau had been walled in by a mosaic border. The contrast between the classically-handled flesh and the ornamental gold surround is the structural tension the paintings run on.

For his landscapes he worked a pointillist-adjacent dabbed stroke—small, even touches of cobalt blue, emerald green, viridian, and cadmium reds and yellows placed beside one another with fine round sable brushes. The color does not blend on the canvas. It mixes optically in the viewer's eye at distance. It is the same logic as the gold surface: a pattern of discrete small units that resolves into image from the right viewing position.

Klimt's portrait process began in drawing. He produced hundreds of preparatory 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. The drawings refined the silhouette, the pose, the angle of the head, and the relationship of the figure to the ornamental field it would sit in.

First: drawing. Studies from life on manila paper, accumulated over weeks or months, until the figure was fully resolved on paper.

Second: transfer. The main contours were transferred to the canvas—usually a square format, which Klimt favored because the square has no inherent directional bias and holds ornament evenly. The transfer was by squaring or by direct copying.

Third: the flesh block-in. The face and hands were painted in a conventional academic manner, with tonal underpainting and blended glazes. This was the only passage in a Klimt portrait that a nineteenth-century academician would recognize.

Fourth: the ornamental field. Decorative elements were squared up from preliminary drawings and applied with mathematical precision. He worked from the center outward, keeping the figure anchored so that the visual density of the pattern never overwhelmed the sitter.

Fifth: the gilding. Pastiglia relief was built in the passages that would receive gold. The mordant was applied and timed. The leaf was laid. The paintings stayed in the studio for months or years—Klimt kept works open for long periods, constantly adjusting the weight of a pattern, the hue of a gold square, or the balance of a silver passage. He declared paintings "unfinished" even after they had been exhibited, and destroyed canvases he felt had failed to hold real and ornamental in balance.

Klimt worked from life for his portraits and his female figure paintings. The sitter came to the Hietzing studio for extended sessions across months. The drawings are the record of that direct observation—the hundreds of manila sheets per portrait are not rehearsal; they are the painting's working reference material.

His visual library was organized around non-Western and pre-Renaissance art. He owned one of the most significant private collections of Japanese woodblock prints and illustrated books in Vienna, and the Japanese tradition of flat spatial planes and empty space as a structural element is the direct source of the decorative logic of his mature portraits. After 1903 the Ravennan Byzantine mosaics joined Japan as a primary reference—the Ravenna trip documented in his letters to Emilie Flöge is the pivot from the Faculty Paintings period into the Golden Phase.

For landscapes the primary reference was the viewfinder-cropped direct observation of the Attersee woods and lake. He painted in the landscape itself when possible and brought smaller canvases back to the studio for finishing under controlled light.

Klimt trained at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule—the School of Arts and Crafts—from 1876 to 1883 under Ferdinand Laufberger and Julius Victor Berger. The training was decorative and architectural, oriented toward the historical-muralist idiom of Hans Makart that dominated Ringstraße-era Vienna. With his brother Ernst and the painter Franz Matsch he ran a successful commercial Künstler-Compagnie producing decorative cycles for the Burgtheater and the Kunsthistorisches Museum through the 1880s and 1890s.

In 1897 he co-founded the Vienna Secession, becoming its first president, and broke with the Makart tradition by organizing the Gesamtkunstwerk exhibitions—most famously the 1902 Beethoven Exhibition—around the Jugendstil integration of painting, architecture, design, and craft.

He held no formal professorship but his studio was a pilgrimage site for younger Viennese artists. His most important protégé was Egon Schiele, whom he met in 1909 when Schiele was nineteen. Klimt provided Schiele with models, introduced him to the Wiener Werkstätte, placed his work in the 1909 Kunstschau, and actively encouraged Schiele's departure from academic training. Oskar Kokoschka also emerged from the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule under the Secessionist atmosphere Klimt had shaped. The Vienna Secession lineage that reaches the current atelier movement descends through Klimt's two-fold legacy: decorative structure as a primary pictorial element, and line as a carrier of psychological meaning.