III. The golden phase: Byzantium on the Ring

Around 1901, and fully from 1903, Klimt entered the phase for which he is famous: the 'golden style', in which he laid actual gold and silver leaf over his paintings, flattening the picture into a shimmering, jewelled surface in which the human figure — usually a face and hands, sometimes a body — floats in a field of ornament. The immediate source was a journey: in 1903 Klimt visited Ravenna and saw the sixth-century Byzantine mosaics of San Vitale and Sant'Apollinare — the gold grounds, the flat hieratic figures of Justinian and Theodora, the whole surface dissolved into light — and the effect on him was decisive. The gold of his father's engraving trade, the flatness of the Jugendstil, the ornament of the Wiener Werkstätte, and the Byzantine mosaic fused into a single manner: the figure as an icon, set in gold.

The golden phase produced the central works. Judith I (1901) had begun it; Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) — the 'gold' portrait, the sitter's face and hands emerging from a dense field of golden ornament, spirals and eyes and squares — is its summit in portraiture; Danaë (1907), the god descending as a shower of gold upon the sleeping, curled, voluptuous woman, is its summit in the erotic; and The Kiss (1907–08) is its summit altogether — the two lovers fused into one golden form at the flowered edge of the void. Around them: the Beethoven Frieze (1902), painted for the Secession's exhibition in homage to Mahler's arrangement of the Ninth Symphony, a mural of longing, hostile forces and final redemption in the arts; and the Stoclet Frieze (1905–11), the Tree of Life with its Expectation and Fulfilment, executed in marble, enamel, gold and semi-precious stone for the Brussels palace of the Wiener Werkstätte — the summit of the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total artwork in which architecture, furniture and decoration are one.

The golden phase in the œuvre

The golden phase proper — roughly 1901 to 1909 — is a brief decade at the centre of a longer career, and it is worth keeping its proportion in view. Klimt painted for some forty years; the gold belongs to less than a quarter of them, framed by the historicist decorations of the 1880s and 90s before and the colour-drenched late portraits and landscapes after. But it is the phase that made him: the pictures that fixed the image of 'Klimt' in the world's eye — The Kiss, the gold Adele, Judith, Danaë — are all of these years, and they are the fullest resolution of the tension that runs through the whole œuvre, between the easel and the surface, the meaning and the ornament, the fine art and the craft. Before the gold, Klimt was resolving that tension in one direction, the decorator becoming a painter; after it, in another, the painter dissolving into colour; in the gold he held the two in perfect, unrepeatable balance, and the balance is why the golden pictures are, for most viewers, simply 'Klimt'.

The golden phase is a paradox, and the paradox is the essay's theme. Gold is the most precious and the most decorative of materials, the stuff of icons and altarpieces and jewellery; to lay it over a modern easel painting was to collapse the distinction between fine and applied art that the whole academic tradition rested on, and to make the picture a precious object, a thing of craft. And Klimt used this most refined and traditional of surfaces to carry the most modern and transgressive of subjects: the naked Danaë in orgasm, the murderous seductress Judith, the frank sexuality of The Kiss. The gold both declares and veils: it makes the erotic sacred, an icon; and it makes the sacred erotic, a jewel. It is the perfect expression of fin-de-siècle Vienna — a society of extreme refinement and extreme repression, of Freud's discovery that beneath the gilded surface ran the drives of sex and death — and Klimt's gold is the surface, laid, always, over the abyss.

Ravenna and the mosaic

The Ravenna journey of 1903 deserves emphasis, because it changed the surface of Klimt's art. In the churches of San Vitale and Sant'Apollinare Nuovo he saw the sixth-century Byzantine mosaics — the emperor Justinian and the empress Theodora and their courts, flat, frontal, hieratic figures set against grounds of pure gold, the whole wall dissolved into shimmering light, the individual made an icon. Klimt, the son of a gold-engraver, trained in the applied arts and steeped in the Werkstätte's cult of precious materials, found in the mosaic the confirmation of everything his art was moving toward: the flat gold ground, the figure as pattern, the picture as a precious object rather than a window. He wrote that the mosaics were 'of an unprecedented splendour', and within four years he had made Adele Bloch-Bauer I and The Kiss, in which a modern Viennese woman is set in gold exactly as Theodora had been — the empress of the abyss, the icon of a secular, erotic, doomed faith. The golden style is Byzantium brought to the Ringstrasse, the sacred surface of the Christian empire put to the service of the Freudian city's cult of sex and death.

Sources of the ornament

The pattern that fills the golden pictures is a synthesis of the world's decorative traditions, and Klimt gathered it deliberately. From Byzantium came the gold ground and the flat hieratic figure; from Mycenae and archaic Greece, the spirals and the gold discs; from Egypt, the eye motif, the hawk and the frontal stance; from Japan, the asymmetry, the cropping and the flat decorative field of the woodblock print and the kimono; from the Wiener Werkstätte's Josef Hoffmann, the severe geometric rectangle and grid; and from the folk art of the Balkans and the Austrian countryside, the flower and the bright motif. The genius of the golden style is the fusion — a single shimmering surface in which Egyptian eyes, Mycenaean spirals, Byzantine gold and Werkstätte grids coexist around a modern Viennese face — and the meaning is in the fusion too: the woman of 1907 made timeless, placed in a decorative eternity assembled from every sacred and precious tradition of the past. The ornament is learned, and it is symbolic; Klimt is a scholar of the surface as Reynolds was a scholar of the pose.

IV. The Beethoven Frieze and the total artwork

Two great decorative schemes stand at the centre of Klimt's mature achievement, and both realise the Secession's dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk — the total work of art in which painting, architecture, music and craft are fused into a single environment.

The first is the Beethoven Frieze (1902), painted for the fourteenth Secession exhibition, which was conceived as a temple to Beethoven around Max Klinger's polychrome statue of the composer, with Gustav Mahler conducting an arrangement of the Ninth Symphony's finale at the opening. Klimt's contribution ran around three walls of a side room — a painted frieze, seven metres long on each wall, in casein, gold, and applied materials (mother-of-pearl, glass, tacks), telling, in the terms of Wagner's reading of the Ninth, the story of humanity's longing for happiness: the Yearning for Happiness, a floating file of supplicant figures; the Hostile Forces, the giant Typhoeus and his daughters, the Gorgons and the figures of Sickness, Madness, Death, Lust, Wantonness and Gnawing Grief; and the resolution, This Kiss to the Whole World, in which the arts lead humanity to the choir of angels and the embracing lovers of Schiller's Ode to Joy. The frieze was meant to be temporary and was nearly destroyed; it survives, restored, in the Secession building, and it is the fullest statement of Klimt's symbolist programme — longing, the hostile drives, and redemption through art and love — and the direct forerunner of The Kiss.

The second is the Stoclet Frieze (1905–11), the dining-room decoration for the Palais Stoclet in Brussels, the Wiener Werkstätte's total artwork — Josef Hoffmann's architecture and every fitting within it designed as one. Klimt's frieze, executed not in paint but in marble, enamel, gold, coral and semi-precious stone by the Werkstätte's craftsmen from his cartoons, is the Tree of Life — a great swirling golden tree filling the long walls, with the standing female figure of Expectation (a dancer in an Egyptian-patterned robe) on one side and the embracing couple of Fulfilment on the other. It is Klimt's one surviving monumental decoration in place, and the purest realisation of the golden style's origins in the mosaic and the precious object: here the 'painting' is literally made of gold and stone, a permanent mosaic, the easel picture become architecture. The Expectation and Fulfilment are the frieze's Kiss — the longing and the embrace — in enamel and gold.

V. The Secession, Ver Sacrum, and Vienna 1900

Klimt's revolt of 1897 has to be seen in its city, because the city is the subject of the art. Vienna in 1900 was the capital of a multinational empire in visible decline, ruled by an aged emperor over a parliament paralysed by nationalities, and it was, at the same moment, one of the most extraordinary concentrations of genius in the history of the West: Freud was writing The Interpretation of Dreams (1900); Mahler was directing the Opera; Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal were remaking the theatre; Wittgenstein and the young philosophers were being formed; Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos were remaking architecture; Schoenberg was approaching atonality. It was a culture of extreme refinement and extreme anxiety, of a brilliant surface over a felt catastrophe, and Klimt is its painter — the gold over the abyss is the city's own condition.

The Secession was the visual-arts wing of this modernism. Its exhibitions brought European art to Vienna and Viennese art to Europe; its journal Ver Sacrum ('Sacred Spring', the title taken from a Roman rite of renewal) carried the new graphic design; its building declared, in Olbrich's white geometry and gilded dome, the break with the historicist Ringstrasse. And its programme — 'to the age its art, to art its freedom', the erasure of the line between fine and applied art, the ideal of the total environment — was Klimt's own. He was its first president and its central figure until 1905, when a dispute over the primacy of the fine or the applied arts, and over the group's commercial direction, split it; Klimt and the 'Klimt group' (including Hoffmann and the Werkstätte artists) left, and Klimt, having seceded from the Künstlerhaus, seceded from the Secession. He never again belonged to an institution; the Kunstschau exhibitions of 1908 and 1909, which he organised, were his last collective ventures, and it was at the 1908 Kunstschau that the state bought The Kiss.

The Wiener Werkstätte — the Vienna Workshops, founded in 1903 by Hoffmann and Koloman Moser on the model of the English Arts and Crafts movement — was the institutional home of Klimt's later ideal: the production of everything, from buildings to cutlery, as designed art, the Gesamtkunstwerk extended to daily life. Klimt was closely tied to it; the Stoclet Frieze was its masterpiece; and the flattening of his painting into pattern and precious material in the golden years is inseparable from the Werkstätte's aesthetic of the designed surface. Emilie Flöge's couture house, which sold the reform dresses Klimt designed and painted, was part of the same world — art extended into dress, the woman herself made a total artwork.