VI. The patrons: a portrait of a class

Klimt's art was sustained, after he abandoned public commissions in 1905, by private patrons, and they were almost all drawn from one group: the wealthy, cultivated, assimilated Jewish haute bourgeoisie of Vienna — the bankers, industrialists and professionals whose families had risen in the liberal era after 1867 and who were the principal patrons of Viennese modernism across the arts. August Lederer, the industrialist, was Klimt's greatest collector, owning the Beethoven Frieze, the University pictures (which he helped Klimt buy back), and many portraits and landscapes; Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, the sugar magnate, commissioned the two portraits of his wife Adele and owned landscapes; the Zuckerkandls, the Primavesis, the Wittgensteins, the Waerndorfers (who financed the Werkstätte) were all patrons and sitters. Klimt painted their wives and daughters, decorated their houses, and depended on their money and their taste; his art is, in a precise sense, the self-image of this class — its refinement, its wealth, its assimilation, and (in retrospect) its doom.

For the tragedy of the patrons is inseparable from the fate of the pictures. Within a generation of Klimt's death, the world he painted was destroyed: the Anschluss of 1938 and the Nazi persecution scattered, murdered or exiled the families who had been his patrons, and looted their collections. The Lederer collection was seized; the Bloch-Bauer pictures were taken (Ferdinand fled, Adele having died in 1925); the University paintings, in Lederer hands, were burned at Immendorf in 1945. The portraits of the Jewish women of Vienna 1900 — Adele Bloch-Bauer, Amalie Zuckerkandl (who died in a death camp), Elisabeth Lederer, Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein — became, after 1945, both the memorials of a destroyed society and the objects of the longest and most consequential art-restitution battles of the postwar era. To look at a Klimt portrait is to look at a member of a class that was, within thirty years of the sitting, annihilated; the gold is the more poignant for it.

VII. The women

Klimt's central subject, from first to last, is the woman. He painted almost no men (the University Jurisprudence and a few early works aside); his portraits are overwhelmingly of women; his allegories are peopled by women; his erotic drawings — thousands of them — are of women; and the whole apparatus of gold and ornament is deployed, again and again, around the female face and body. The women fall into kinds, and the kinds are the age's fantasies and fears made visible.

There is the femme fatale: Judith I (1901), the biblical heroine who beheaded Holofernes, painted not as a virtuous patriot but as a Viennese society woman in a gold choker, half-swooning in erotic triumph, the severed head at the edge of the frame — the seductress-murderess who was the period's great male anxiety, the woman as devourer. Judith II (1909), Danaë, the Water Serpents, the floating sensualists of the friezes — the woman as sex, as danger, as the drive Freud was naming a few streets away.

There is the society portrait: the great sequence of full-length portraits of the wives and daughters of Vienna's Jewish haute bourgeoisie — the Bloch-Bauers, the Lederers, the Zuckerkandls, the Wittgensteins, the Riedlers, the Primavesi — who were Klimt's principal patrons and collectors. Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) in her field of gold; Fritza Riedler (1906); Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein (1905), the philosopher's sister; Emilie Flöge (1902), the painter's companion, in a patterned blue gown; and, in the late years, the colour-drenched Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912), Mäda Primavesi, Elisabeth Lederer, Friederike Maria Beer. These are the images of a class — cultivated, wealthy, assimilated, Jewish, doomed a generation later — and they are, with the Reynolds portraits of the English governing class, among the great sociological portrait-sequences in art: a world seen through its women, at the moment before it was destroyed.

And there is the woman as the vessel of life and death: the mothers and the ages. The Three Ages of Woman (1905) — the infant, the young mother, the old crone — and Death and Life (1910–15), the skeleton Death watching the sleeping column of the living; Hope I (1903) and Hope II (1907–08), the pregnant nude, the belly the picture's centre, with death's-heads and a skull among the ornament — Klimt's most direct fusion of sex, generation and mortality. Pregnancy, which academic art did not show, Klimt made a subject; the naked pregnant body, serene and doomed, is one of his great inventions.

The women have provoked a century of argument. To some — the period's critics, and some feminists since — they are the male gaze at its most possessive: woman as object, as ornament, as sex and death, painted by a man who fathered at least fourteen children by his models and never married. To others they are something more sympathetic: the frankest and least sentimental images of female desire, pregnancy and age in the art of their time, painted by a man who plainly loved women, worked constantly with them, and gave them, in the drawings above all, an autonomy of pleasure that the age denied them. The pictures hold both readings, as The Kiss holds both the sacred and the erotic; the woman is Klimt's icon and his obsession, and the gold is the frame he built around her.

The women, in the aggregate

Seen together, the portraits of the women of Vienna 1900 are one of the great collective portraits in art — a class caught, as Reynolds caught the English governing class, through its women, at the moment before its world ended. But where Reynolds's sitters were the confident rulers of a rising empire, Klimt's are the wives and daughters of a cultivated, wealthy, assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie that had risen in a brief liberal springtime and would be destroyed within a generation; and the gold that frames them, the ornamental eternity in which Klimt sets them, reads now as an unwitting elegy. Adele Bloch-Bauer, twice painted, died in 1925 and so escaped the worst; her portraits were looted, her family scattered. Amalie Zuckerkandl, painted in an unfinished picture of 1917–18, was murdered in the Belzec death camp. The Lederers were ruined and their collection burned. The women in the gold are the survivors and the victims of a catastrophe the pictures could not foresee and now cannot help but record; the icon has become a memorial.

VIII. How a Klimt is made: gold, pattern, and the flat surface

The technique is the meaning, and it repays description.

The ground and the gold. In the golden phase Klimt worked on canvas prepared in the ordinary way, but he laid over parts of it — sometimes most of it — gold and silver leaf, applied with a size as a gilder does, and then worked into and over: tooling the gold, drawing patterns in it, laying paint over it and gold over paint. The gold is real metal, and it does what metal does — it catches and throws light, so that the picture changes as the viewer moves, and the flat surface becomes a shifting, living thing. The debt is to his father's engraving trade, to the Byzantine mosaic, to the icon and the altarpiece, and to the Wiener Werkstätte's cult of precious materials; the effect is to make the painting an object, a jewel, rather than a window.

Pattern and flatness. Klimt dissolves the figure into ornament. In Adele Bloch-Bauer I the sitter's dress and the ground behind her become a continuous field of gold pattern — spirals, triangles, the 'eye' motif, rectangles — out of which only the face, the hands and a patch of shoulder emerge as modelled, three-dimensional flesh; the body has become surface. In The Kiss the man's robe is black-and-white rectangles, the woman's coloured circles, and the two patterns distinguish and unite them. The pattern is drawn from many sources — Mycenaean gold, Egyptian eyes, Japanese textiles, Byzantine mosaic, the geometric ornament of the Werkstätte's Josef Hoffmann — and it flattens the picture into a decorative plane in which the modelled face is an island of realism in a sea of design. This tension — the realistic face, the ornamental everything-else — is the signature of the golden style.

Drawing. Beneath and beside the paintings lie the drawings, and Klimt was one of the supreme draughtsmen of his age. Some three to four thousand survive — rapid, economical pencil or chalk studies, overwhelmingly of women, many frankly erotic: women reclining, masturbating, embracing, asleep, in poses of an intimacy and an autonomy that the paintings only imply. The drawings were partly studies for the paintings and partly an independent, private practice; they are the erotic foundation of the whole œuvre, the place where the desire that the gold sublimates is set down directly, in a pure and beautiful line. They are catalogued and held separately (chiefly in the Albertina); a few designs and cartoons are in this catalogue among the works on paper.

The late colour. After about 1909 the gold recedes. Klimt's last decade — the portraits and landscapes of 1910–18 — replaces the gold ground with dense, bright, mosaic-like fields of colour: the influence of the Fauves and of the folk art and East Asian art he collected. Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912) stands against a wall of blue, green and rose; the late portraits — Mäda Primavesi, Friederike Maria Beer, Elisabeth Lederer, the Lady with a Fan — set the figure in fields of Asian and folk motif, flowers and figures and birds, in a hot, high-keyed colour that is the golden style translated out of metal into pigment. The late manner is less famous than the gold but is, to many, the richer: the pattern remains, the colour replaces the gold, and the surface is as dense and as flat and as beautiful.