The Gold Is the Least of It

The Trap Klimt Sets

There is a moment, standing before The Kiss in the Upper Belvedere, when the gold simply wins. The painting is larger than most people expect — roughly six feet square — and it reflects differently from second to second as you shift your weight. Your eye goes to the mosaic patterns on the robe, to the halo of flowers, to the sheer optically difficult fact of gold leaf on a painted surface. You have seen it a hundred times in reproduction and it still does something to you in person. Klimt knew this would happen. He built the trap deliberately.

But the painting is not the gold. The painting is a woman's hands — one hanging loose and slightly unnatural at the man's shoulder, the other folded inward with the fingers just beginning to curl — and it is a face turned so far from the viewer that we cannot verify the expression. We see the line of a jaw, a cheekbone, closed eyes. We are denied the face. Klimt, working in an era in which the face was everything in academic painting, withholds it. The gold leaf is, among other things, a distraction technique: keep the eye moving across the surface, and the viewer won't notice how carefully the image is constructed to refuse information.

Look at the hands again. The woman's left hand is resting on the man's, and her fingers are arranged — there is no other word — with a kind of formal tension that has nothing in common with the decorative flatness of the surrounding robe. The drawing is precise. It is the drawing of someone who had spent years doing studio figure work, who knew what a hand looked like from fifteen angles, and who then chose to render it naturalistically in a painting whose dominant mode is pure surface pattern. The contrast is not accidental: the hands and face are where Klimt insists the image is still figurative, still about bodies, still about feeling. Everything else is ornament.

Where the Gold Came From

Klimt's use of gold leaf dates from the late 1890s, and it has a specific intellectual context. He later visited Ravenna (in 1903) and saw the Byzantine mosaics, which reinforced the direction he had already taken. — sixth-century images of emperors and saints rendered in tessellated gold ground, flat and hieratic, with no interest in depth or shadow. He had also been following the direction of the Vienna Secession, the movement he helped found in 1897, which was explicitly hostile to the naturalism of the academic tradition: the Secession wanted art that was total, decorative, and spiritually intense, not illusionistic.

Gold leaf was a way of making the surface undeniable. In conventional oil painting, the surface is a fiction: the point is to look through it at a represented world. A gold ground refuses this. You cannot look through gold; you look at it. The surface announces itself as a surface, and the image becomes something closer to an icon than a window. This was theological and not merely aesthetic: Byzantine gold grounds were understood to represent divine light, not natural light, the gold standing in for a realm outside ordinary space and time. Klimt was secular, but he was borrowing the grammar of transcendence.

What he did that Byzantium did not was retain the figure. The mosaics he saw in Ravenna are solemn, frontal, emptied of individuality. Klimt's figures are psychologically dense, physically specific, and — especially in the faces and hands — charged with the vocabulary of late-nineteenth-century Viennese thought about desire, the unconscious, and the body. He was taking a medieval technique of spiritual elevation and bending it toward the very material world medieval art had been designed to transcend. The gold says: this is sacred. The drawing underneath says: this is flesh.

What the Judith Tells You More Directly

Judith I, hanging at the Belvedere since the early twentieth century, is the painting that makes the argument more visible. The title is from the Book of Judith — the Hebrew widow who seduces and decapitates the Assyrian general Holofernes and thereby saves her people — but Klimt's painting is not quite that story. The woman is not a heroine executing a tactical necessity. She is depicted mid-ecstasy, head thrown back, lips parted, eyes half-closed, her hand resting on the severed head of a man she has just killed. The expression on her face is not triumph. It is something closer to the far side of orgasm.

The gold here is in the collar — a broad, gorgeous piece worked in flat patterning that frames the neck — and in the background. It does what it does in The Kiss: announces the image as non-naturalistic, elevates it, removes it from ordinary space. But because the face is not withheld here, because Klimt gives us the full expression, the contrast between the decorative ground and the psychological specificity of what is depicted is even starker.

Klimt used a model for the face — as he did throughout his career — and the rendering is almost portrait-specific: this is not a generic Judith but a woman with a particular bone structure and a particular quality of attention. The fingers resting in the dark hair of the severed head are painted with the same care as the hands in The Kiss: individual, considered, slightly disturbing in their specificity. The drawing underneath the gold is always the drawing of something that happened in a body.

How to Actually Look at These Paintings

A practical suggestion, for visitors who have limited time before the reflex to photograph takes over: start with the edges. In both The Kiss and Judith I, the figurative drawing is concentrated at the edges of the body — hands, faces, the line of a neck — while the centre of the figure dissolves into pattern. This is the structure Klimt uses in nearly all the major works of the gold phase, sometimes called the golden period. Train your eye to move from the warm, complicated, specific edge to the flat patterned centre, and you will see the argument the painting is making: that the body and the decorative surface are in active dialogue, not peaceful synthesis.

The floor plane in The Kiss is also worth time. The couple are kneeling on a narrow shelf of flowers and grass at the very bottom of the canvas, beyond which there is simply void — the image stops. Klimt has pushed the pair to the edge of the world. The flowers are rendered with botanical specificity, a spray of different species, almost at odds with the abstracted robe. Below the flowers: nothing. The lovers are at the edge of a precipice, or at the edge of the picture, which comes to the same thing. The decorative language of the robe and the gold ground would make this feel joyous if you stayed with the surface. The ground plane tells a different story.

The gold leaf catches the eye, flatters the phone camera, and explains why reproductions of these paintings are everywhere. But Klimt was a figure painter of the first rank before he ever touched gold leaf — trained in the conservative Habsburg tradition at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts and through years of decorative commission work — and he never stopped being one. The ornament is the argument. The drawing is the evidence. Both are required.