IV.

Wiener Werkstätte

Klimt’s motif of an embracing couple, the kiss, first appeared in the Beethoven frieze. He used it again in single canvases and in his mosaic designs for a private house, the Palais Stoclet (1905-1911), built for Belgian industrialist Adolphe Stoclet in Brussels. Klimt worked on the Palais Stoclet in collaboration with architect Josef Hoffmann and designer Kolomon Moser. Their association in the Sezession had resulted in 1903 in the formation of the Wiener Werkstätte, a collective dedicated to producing high-quality domestic products and unified interior design. The sumptuous décor of the Palais Stoclet, including Klimt’s mosaic-lined dining room, was the Werkstätte’s masterpiece.

When the Werkstätte produced too few commissions to keep Klimt busy with decorative projects, he turned to painting landscapes and portraits of society figures. The jewel-like tones, the flat, unshadowed surfaces, and the sinuous, curling lines and patterns seen in his mosaics and the Beethoven Frieze also characterize these later works. Indeed, the faces in his portraits almost disappear in the dense decorative patterns that accumulate on the picture surface; gilded cubes encase the heads like flattened crowns. It was an idiosyncratic approach to painting Vienna’s wealthiest art patrons. Klimt seldom exhibited his work in his later years, but he supported younger Austrian artists such as Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka in their battles against censorship. Klimt died on February 6, 1918, after a stroke.