Craft, Ornament, Vienna Secession, and the Modern Surface
When people think of Gustav Klimt, they almost inevitably think of gold: shimmering surfaces, intricate ornamentation, and paintings that feel less like windows onto another world than precious, enigmatic objects in their own right. The Kiss, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, Judith I, and the Beethoven Frieze all show how completely Klimt transformed gold from a material of luxury into a modern artistic language.
But Klimt’s gold did not appear from nowhere. It grew out of family craft, architectural decoration, the Vienna Secession and its rebellion against academic tradition, Byzantine mosaics, Japanese and East Asian design, medieval painting, and the charged cultural world of fin-de-siecle Vienna.
Gold became his way of collapsing boundaries: between painting and object, fine art and applied art, portrait and icon, surface and depth. For Elliott Best, this history matters because our restorations are not simply about making Klimt brighter. They are about understanding why his surfaces looked the way they did, why ornament mattered, and why gold became one of the most radical tools in his art.
Klimt used real gold leaf, silver, platinum, gold dust, and fine gold powder, not merely yellow paint. His major engagement with gold intensified around 1900, with Judith I often identified as a turning point in his large-scale use of real gold leaf. His father, Ernst Klimt, was a goldsmith and engraver, and his brothers also worked within artistic and craft traditions, helping shape Klimt’s respect for material, surface, and ornament.
Klimt’s 1903 trip to Ravenna exposed him to Byzantine mosaics whose gold grounds and jewel-like surfaces deeply influenced his Golden Phase. Gold became a modern language for Klimt: a way to make paintings flatter, more symbolic, more decorative, and more emotionally charged.
From Goldsmithing to Painting
Klimt was born into a household where craft was not secondary to art. His father, Ernst Klimt, was a goldsmith and engraver. This matters. Klimt’s later interest in metal, precious surfaces, pattern, and applied decoration did not come only from museums or art theory. It had roots in the material intelligence of the workshop.
Klimt also came from a family in which art and craft overlapped. His brother Ernst became a painter and decorative artist, and his younger brother Georg was an engraver and metalworker. Georg contributed to the famous Vienna Secession building, including metalwork associated with its doors. These family connections help explain why Klimt never treated decorative art as inferior. To him, surface, frame, object, textile, architecture, jewellery, and painting could all belong to one artistic universe.
That point is essential. Klimt’s gold was not just a visual effect. It was part of a broader philosophy: art should not be trapped inside academic categories. A painting could behave like jewellery, mosaic, textile, icon, mural, and decorative object all at once.
The Vienna Secession: To Every Age Its Art
In 1897, Klimt became a co-founder and first president of the Vienna Secession, a group of artists who broke away from the conservative Association of Austrian Artists. Their famous motto, displayed above the Secession building entrance, was: “To every age its art, to every art its freedom.” That sentence could almost serve as a key to Klimt’s entire mature career.
The Secession did not promote one single style. Instead, it created space for modern artists to experiment with symbolism, international influences, design, print culture, architecture, and decorative art. It also challenged the idea that “serious” painting had to imitate nature or follow academic rules.
This environment encouraged Klimt to push harder. The boundaries between painting, design, mural, illustration, and applied art became increasingly porous. In the Secession’s journal Ver Sacrum, in exhibition posters, in murals and friezes, and later in portraits, Klimt developed a visual language in which ornament was not decoration added after the fact. Ornament became structure. Pattern became meaning. Surface became drama.
Why Ornament Was Controversial
Today, Klimt’s ornament feels luxurious and irresistible. In his own time, it could be read as provocative, excessive, and even morally suspect. The controversy was not only aesthetic. It was also political and social.
Fin-de-siecle Vienna was a city of extraordinary cultural creativity, but also a city shaped by sharp class tensions, misogyny, nationalism, and antisemitism. Many of Klimt’s most important patrons and portrait sitters came from wealthy Jewish Viennese families who supported modern art, music, architecture, and design. Adele Bloch-Bauer, Serena Lederer, Elisabeth Lederer, Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein, and others belonged to a world in which collecting and commissioning modern art was part of a broader cultural identity.
Because of this, antisemitic critics sometimes attacked Secessionist taste, associating Jewish patronage with excessive ornament, luxury, and “foreign” modernity. Klimt himself was Catholic, but because of his close connections with Jewish patrons and collectors, hostile critics could label him through an antisemitic lens. Some cartoons and commentary attacked his use of ornament and rich materials as if decoration itself were suspect.
This makes the paintings even more historically charged. The gold and ornament were not merely beautiful. They sat inside a battle over modernity: who could define culture, whose taste mattered, and whether art should obey tradition or invent a new visual language.
The Faculty Paintings and the Scandal of “Medicine”
Klimt’s shift toward a more radical symbolic language can be seen in the scandal surrounding the University of Vienna Faculty Paintings: Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence. Commissioned in the 1890s for the university’s Great Hall, they were expected to celebrate knowledge, progress, and institutional ideals. Instead, Klimt produced dark, ambiguous allegories filled with the human body, sexuality, mortality, and uncertainty.
Medicine was especially controversial. Its imagery included Hygieia, the goddess associated with healing, an Aesculapian snake, a bowl, bodies, birth, age, suffering, and death. Rather than offering a triumphant image of medical science, Klimt presented humanity as vulnerable and exposed. Conservative viewers were outraged.
The Faculty Paintings never reached their intended home in their original form. They passed into private hands and were later stored during the Second World War. In May 1945, the works were destroyed in the fire at Schloss Immendorf, along with other Klimt paintings. Only sketches, black-and-white photographs, and a few colour references remain. That is why any restored or reimagined version of Medicine is not merely decorative. It participates in the recovery of a lost modern masterpiece.
From Painted Gold to Real Gold Leaf
Klimt did not begin his career by covering canvases with metal. In his earlier works, golden objects or backgrounds were often painted rather than constructed from real gold leaf. Around 1900, however, gold became increasingly central to his method.
Judith I, completed in 1901, is often treated as a breakthrough because Klimt used real gold leaf on a large scale, not as a minor accent but as a major component of the painting’s visual power. From that point forward, gold became one of his primary artistic tools. He used it for backgrounds, jewellery, garments, halos, symbolic forms, and ornamental fields.
Klimt’s gold made the picture less like an illusionistic window and more like an object. It flattened space, intensified the surface, and moved the image closer to mosaic, icon, textile, and jewellery.
Ravenna and the Byzantine Imagination
One of the most important turning points came in 1903, when Klimt visited Ravenna, Italy, and saw the sixth-century Byzantine mosaics in the Church of San Vitale. The mosaics of Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora, with their frontal figures, jewel-like patterning, and gold grounds, made a deep impression on him.
This influence is visible in Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. Adele’s body seems to dissolve into gold, silver, eyes, triangles, spirals, initials, and jewel-like pattern. She appears both human and iconic. That tension between living portrait and sacred surface is one of the great achievements of Klimt’s Golden Phase.
Byzantine art gave Klimt a way to make modern portraiture feel timeless. It allowed him to detach the figure from ordinary space and place her within a field of light, pattern, and symbolic intensity.
How Klimt Worked with Gold
Klimt’s technique was more complex than simply applying gold leaf. He used gold leaf, silver, platinum, gold dust, and fine gold powder bound into oil so it could be brushed like paint. He also varied the surface beneath the metal so it could appear smooth, matte, grainy, polished, raised, or softly textured.
This is why Klimt’s gold feels alive. It changes with light. A passage may appear flat and decorative from one angle, then suddenly shimmer or reveal texture from another. In a room, the painting behaves almost like a living surface. That quality is central to the Elliott Best restoration approach: gold should not become a single loud yellow tone. It needs tonal range, warmth, depth, texture, and restraint.
Gold, Portraiture, and the Modern Woman
Klimt’s Golden Phase reached its peak with works such as Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I and The Kiss. In Adele, the sitter’s face and hands remain delicately naturalistic, while the rest of the painting becomes a world of gold, symbol, geometry, and ornament. This contrast is essential. Klimt never abandons the human being. He surrounds her with a visual language that makes her both present and mysterious.
Many of Klimt’s great portraits are of women connected to Vienna’s Jewish bourgeoisie. These women were not passive ornaments in his career. They were collectors, patrons, cultural participants, and members of families that helped shape Vienna’s modern artistic life. Their portraits reveal how modern identity could be expressed through design, fashion, surface, and psychological presence.
That is one reason these works still feel contemporary. Klimt understood that a portrait could be more than likeness. It could be an entire world built around a person: their class, taste, culture, confidence, vulnerability, and mystery.
Why Gold Belongs in Klimt’s Landscapes Too
Klimt also used gold and gold-like pictorial effects in landscapes. This may seem surprising, but it makes sense once we understand how he saw landscape. Klimt’s landscapes are rarely open windows into deep space. They are dense, square, tapestry-like compositions. Trees, flowers, gardens, water, and light become ornamental fields.
In this context, gold does not simply make a landscape more expensive-looking. It reinforces the decorative logic of the image. Nature becomes surface, rhythm, pattern, and colour. A sunflower, a meadow, a farmhouse, or a park avenue can be treated with the same sensitivity to structure and ornament that Klimt brought to a portrait gown or gold background.
What This Means for Elliott Best Restorations
For Elliott Best, Klimt’s gold and ornament demand a careful restoration philosophy. The goal is never to make a work simply brighter, sharper, or more commercially dramatic. Klimt’s surfaces depend on relationships: matte and shine, warmth and coolness, flatness and depth, flesh and ornament, restraint and intensity.
Our restoration work should therefore focus on restoring balance: the layered warmth of gold, the soft radiance of skin, the crisp rhythm of ornament, the quiet texture of paint, and the atmospheric unity of the whole composition. When we restore a Klimt, we are not just restoring colour. We are restoring an argument about modern art.
Klimt believed painting could absorb the intelligence of craft, design, architecture, fashion, metalwork, and mosaic. That is why his works continue to feel alive. They are not merely images. They are surfaces of culture, memory, desire, resistance, and light.
Collector’s Note: Gold Leaf Application
For selected Elliott Best Klimt editions, a custom gold leaf application may be available. This option is especially meaningful for works from or inspired by Klimt’s Golden Phase, where gold is not simply a colour but part of the artwork’s historical and emotional identity. For collectors interested in a custom edition with gold leaf application, please email hello@elliottbest.com for details.
Sources Consulted
· Belvedere Museum, “Why Did Gustav Klimt Use Gold?”
· Google Arts & Culture, “Gustav Klimt and the Secession,” written by Dr. Franz Smola.
· Neue Galerie New York, “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I.”
· Medical University of Vienna, “The Medicine by Gustav Klimt.”
· Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art research guide citing Claude Cernuschi’s discussion of Klimt, ornament, goldsmithing, and Art Nouveau.
· West 86th / Bard Graduate Center review of Elana Shapira’s Style and Seduction, discussing Jewish patronage, Secessionism, and antisemitic criticism in fin-de-siecle Vienna.
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