Gustav Klimt

Among Klimt's major works of the Golden Style is the mosaic frieze he designed for the dining room of the Palais Stoclet in Brussels, built by Josef Hoffmann. The frieze was executed by the Wiener Werkstätte and the Leopold Forstner mosaic workshop in 1910/11. On the two long walls, the main figures of "Expectation" (an exotic dancer) and "Fulfillment" (an embracing couple) face each other. Klimt's graphic exploration of these figures, along with their predecessors, is reflected in several series of studies and can be traced back to 1904/05 by Alice Strobl. The sheet shown here belongs to the outstanding series of reading and singing women, which was created around 1907, roughly parallel to a large group of striding nude figures. These heroic female profile figures seem to strive towards an invisible goal, while the frontally depicted singers and readers are completely at rest within themselves. Neither the one nor the other study group was used for the frieze, but both series precede the studies for the dancer of "Expectation" and the couple of "Fulfillment". In their contrasting effect, Klimt draws on the program of his "Beethoven Frieze", painted in 1901/02, in which the horizontal movement of floating and striding conveys the longing for happiness, while the frontal positions - especially in the singing angels of the paradise scene - refer to the inner elevation of humanity through the arts.   With simple, precise pencil lines, Klimt outlines the flat-projected spatial layers of the geometrized hands, the rectangular sheet of paper, the vibrantly patterned cloak, the simple, long dress, and the bare shoulder area. With great ease, he differentiates between the substances, the light values, and the degrees of reality. The lack of groundedness of the columnarly anchored frontal figure, whose feet are cut off by the lower edge of the sheet, underlines the solemn mood of this work, which Klimt created in one of the most inspired phases of his graphic art.

original german text by Marian Bisanz-Prakken