XII. Four pictures, closely

Judith I, 1901 (Belvedere). A woman's head and torso emerge from a field of gold — the Assyrian ornament of the ground, the gold choker at her throat, the gold of her half-open robe; her eyes are half-closed, her lips parted, her cheek flushed; and at the lower right, almost cropped out of the frame, is the severed head of Holofernes, whose hair her hand grips. The biblical Judith, the virtuous widow who saved her people by beheading the enemy general, is here a Viennese femme fatale in erotic triumph — the murder and the orgasm fused, the woman as the beautiful devourer. Klimt's contemporaries, disturbed, tried to rename her Salome; she is Judith, and she is the golden style's first great statement of its central theme: sex, death and gold in one shimmering icon.

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907 (Neue Galerie, New York). The 'Woman in Gold'. Adele Bloch-Bauer, the wife of a sugar magnate and (by tradition) Klimt's lover, sits — or rather floats — in a field of gold ornament so dense that the boundary between her body and the ground dissolves: only her face, her shoulders and her clasped hands are modelled flesh; her dress and the space around her are a continuous shimmer of spirals, triangles, rectangles and the Egyptian 'eye' motif, in gold and silver leaf. It is the summit of the golden portrait — the sitter made an icon, a Byzantine empress on a gold ground — and it is, since its restitution and record sale, the most famous portrait of the twentieth century. The face, anxious and refined, is the one realistic thing; everything else is the gold that both exalts and imprisons her.

Danaë, 1907 (Leopold Museum, Vienna). The mortal princess Danaë, whom Zeus visited as a shower of gold, lies curled in sleep, filling the square canvas — a great nude, knees drawn up, red hair, the golden shower pouring between her thighs in a cascade of coins and spirals. It is Klimt's most frankly erotic major painting: the myth is a transparent figure for the sexual act, the woman's pleasure its subject, the gold the divine and the seminal at once. It scandalised and it endures; it is the golden style turned wholly to the body, and one of the great images of female sexuality in Western art.

The late portraits and the turn from gold

After about 1909 the gold recedes, and the last decade produces a different splendour. Klimt's collection of East Asian and folk art — Chinese and Japanese robes, Korean and African objects, the painted furniture of the Austrian countryside — floods into the late portraits: the sitter now stands not in gold but against a wall of dense, high-keyed colour peopled with Asian horsemen, phoenixes, flowers and figures, in a hot mosaic of pattern. Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912) stands against blue and rose; Mäda Primavesi (1912), a child, plants her feet on a floor of scattered blossom; Friederike Maria Beer (1916) stands before a swarm of Korean warriors; the Lady with a Fan (1917–18), on his easel at his death, floats among phoenixes and lotuses; the Portrait of a Lady in Ricci-Oddi and the Amalie Zuckerkandl (1917–18) are left half-finished, the faces done and the colour-fields begun. The late colour is, to many, the equal of the gold — the same flattening of the figure into a decorative field, the same island of modelled face, but in pigment rather than metal, and in a range and heat of colour the gold did not allow. It is Klimt's answer to the Fauves and to Matisse, arrived at independently and from the East, and it is the direction his art was taking when the stroke and the influenza ended it in 1918.

The unfinished pictures

Klimt's death left an easel of unfinished pictures, and they are among the most instructive things he made, because they show the method laid bare. In the Lady with a Fan, the Portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl, the Bride and Adam and Eve, the faces and some flesh are complete and modelled, and around them the fields of colour and pattern are begun, blocked, or still only drawn in charcoal on the bare canvas — so that one sees exactly how Klimt worked: the realistic face first, then the decorative field built around it, the two joined last. The unfinished pictures are the golden style's X-ray, and they are also, in their incompleteness, strangely moving — the last works of a man who died with the brush in reach, the faces of his sitters emerging from grounds that would never be finished, the pattern trailing off into bare cloth. They are the fitting close of an œuvre about the surface laid over the void: here the void is the unpainted canvas, and the surface stops halfway.

The Kiss, 1907–08 (Belvedere). Two lovers kneel at the edge of a flowered meadow that ends in gold; the man, crowned with ivy, bends the woman's face to his and kisses her cheek; she, eyes closed, kneels into him, her feet at the very edge of the abyss. The two bodies are fused into a single golden form, distinguished only by their patterns — his black-and-white rectangles, hers coloured circles and flowers. It is the summit of everything: the erotic made sacred and the sacred made erotic, the human dissolved into ornament, the gold laid over the void at the meadow's edge. It is the most reproduced image in modern art, and it has survived its own ubiquity: seen fresh, in the Belvedere, at nearly two metres square, it is overwhelming — a real gold, a real tenderness, and a real edge.

Death and Life, 1910–15 (Leopold Museum). At the right, a dense column of the living — infants, lovers, mothers, an old woman — sleeps and dreams, wrapped in a field of coloured ornament; at the left, separated by a band of dark, the grinning skeleton of Death, robed in crosses, leans in with a club, watching. It is Klimt's most explicit statement of his lifelong theme, and its structure — the beautiful, patterned column of life, the dark figure of death at its edge — is the structure of the whole œuvre: the surface of life laid over, and watched by, the void. Klimt reworked the picture for years and changed its ground from gold to a dense grey-blue, a mark of the turn from the golden style; it won first prize at the Rome international exhibition of 1911. What the professors had rejected in the public Medicine — the vision of life as a driven, mortal stream watched by death — Klimt made again, and kept, in the private allegory.

XIII. How to look at a Klimt

See the gold as substance. Reproduction flattens it; the real gold and silver leaf catch and throw light, so that a Klimt of the golden phase changes as you move, glitters, comes alive. Stand to one side, and move; the picture is an object, a jewel, and it behaves like one.

Find the flesh in the ornament. Klimt's method is the tension between the modelled, realistic face and hands and the flat, ornamental everything-else. Look for where the three-dimensional body emerges from the two-dimensional pattern — the face, the hands, a patch of shoulder — and see how small the realistic part is, and how it floats in the design. That island of flesh in the sea of gold is the picture's emotional centre.

Read the pattern. The ornament is not random: the 'eye' motifs, the spirals, the rectangles and circles, the flowers, are drawn from Byzantine, Egyptian, Mycenaean and Japanese sources, and they carry meaning — the male and female patterns in The Kiss, the eyes and wombs of the erotic pictures. Klimt is a symbolist; the decoration signifies.

Look for the abyss. Beneath the beauty runs the theme: sex and death, the drives Freud was naming. The skull in Hope, the Death in Death and Life, the severed head in Judith, the void at the edge of The Kiss — the gold is always laid over something dark, and the pictures are about that layering. The surface is the subject, and so is what it covers.

And then see the landscapes and the drawings, which most people miss. The Attersee landscapes are Klimt without the femme fatale and the gold — pure surface, pure summer; and the erotic drawings are Klimt without the ornament — pure line, pure desire. Between them they are the two poles the gold holds together.

The erotic drawings

A word more on the drawings, because they are half of Klimt and the half the public rarely sees. Some three to four thousand survive, and a large proportion are frankly, explicitly erotic: women alone and in pairs, reclining, sleeping, in the act of love, drawn from the life in a rapid, economical, unbroken pencil or crayon line of extraordinary beauty. They were not, for the most part, studies for paintings; they were a continuous private practice, and Klimt drew constantly, models always in the studio. What is striking about them, beside the beauty of the line, is the autonomy they grant the women: these are not objects arranged for a male viewer but women absorbed in their own pleasure, self-possessed, unregarding of the artist. They are the direct form of the desire that the paintings sublimate into gold and ornament, and they have been, since their fuller publication in the later twentieth century, the ground of the modern reassessment of Klimt as a painter of female sexuality rather than merely of the femme fatale. The paintings veil; the drawings declare; and the two together are the whole of his art of the body.

The technique of the gold

A word on how the gold was actually made, since it is the thing everyone remembers. Klimt applied gold and silver leaf to the canvas as a gilder does — laying the thin metal on a size (an adhesive ground) and burnishing it — and then worked into and over it: tooling patterns into the metal with a point, laying paint over the gold and gold over paint, building the surface up in layers of metal, pigment and applied ornament. The gold is real, and it behaves as metal behaves: it catches and throws light, so that the picture is never the same twice, shifting and glittering as the viewer moves, alive in a way that flat pigment cannot be. This is why reproduction fails the golden pictures so completely — the photograph flattens the living metal into a dull yellow — and why they must be seen, and moved before, in the flesh. The technique came from three sources at once: his father's trade of gold-engraving, in which Klimt grew up; the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna, which he saw in 1903; and the Wiener Werkstätte's cult of the precious material, the object made beautiful in gold and enamel and stone. In fusing them Klimt did something no easel painter had done — he made the picture a piece of goldsmith's work, an object as much as an image, and in doing so collapsed the distinction between the fine and the applied arts that the whole academic tradition had rested on. The gold is not a colour; it is a substance, and the substance is the meaning.

The frankness of the drawings, set beside the reticence of the man, is one of the puzzles of Klimt. He left no diary, no confessional letters, no theory of the erotic; he simply drew, day after day, the women who were always in his studio, in every posture of desire and repose, with a line that neither moralises nor caricatures nor idealises but simply, attentively, sees. The drawings are the least veiled thing he made and the most private; they were not exhibited in his lifetime beyond a few, and their full publication and appreciation came only long after his death. They are the ground on which the modern estimate of Klimt rests — the evidence that the painter of the femme fatale was also, and more deeply, the most sympathetic observer of female pleasure in the art of his time, and that the gold of the paintings is a sublimation, a veiling in ornament, of the direct desire the drawings set down in pure line.

Coda

'Whoever wants to know something about me ought to look carefully at my pictures.' Klimt left no self-portrait and almost no words, and the instruction is the right one: the man is in the surfaces — the gold from his father's trade, the pattern from the museums, the women from the studio and the drawing-room, the summer lakes, the abyss at the meadow's edge. He took the decorator's craft and made it carry the easel painter's meaning; he took the most refined ornament in the history of art and laid it over the most direct treatment of sex and death; and he painted, in the gold, the beautiful, doomed face of a civilisation nine months from its end. The University pictures burned; the collections were looted and scattered and fought over; the empire dissolved; and the gold survived — The Kiss on every wall in the world, the Woman in Gold restored to the light, the Attersee meadows and the erotic line. The catalogue that follows goes through the paintings in order, from the young decorator's historicist ceilings to the colour-drenched portraits left unfinished on the easel in February 1918, and the order is the story: the craft, the revolt, the gold, the abyss, and the summer lake.

He is, in the end, the painter of a threshold — between the fine art and the applied, between the nineteenth century's confidence and the twentieth's anxiety, between the gilded surface and the Freudian depth, between an empire's splendour and its fall. The threshold is why the gold both attracts and unsettles: it is the most beautiful surface modern painting made, and it is laid, always and knowingly, over the void — the void at the meadow's edge in The Kiss, the skeleton at the edge of Death and Life, the unpainted canvas at the edge of the last, unfinished portraits. Klimt died with the brush in reach and the faces of his sitters emerging from grounds that would never be finished, in the last winter of the empire whose image he had spent his life gilding; and the pictures that survive — the ones the fire spared and the looters returned — are that empire's most beautiful and most honest self-portrait: a civilisation that knew, beneath its gold, what was coming, and set it down.