About Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt (14 July 1862 – 6 February 1918) was an Austrian Symbolist painter and a founding member of the Vienna Secession movement.
His work helped define the Art Nouveau style in Europe.
Born in Vienna into a lower middle-class family, his father Ernst worked as an engraver and goldsmith — a craft that would leave an unmistakable imprint on his son's aesthetic.
In 1876, Klimt earned a scholarship to the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, where he studied until 1883 and received training as an architectural painter.
His early work had a classical style typical of late 19th-century academic painting, as seen in his murals for the Vienna Burgtheater (1888) and on the staircase of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. That conventional success, however, proved to be a point of departure rather than a destination. In 1897, Klimt and a group of like-minded artists resigned from the Vienna Artists' Association and founded the Vienna Secession — a decisive break that freed him to pursue a radically personal visual language. Life, love, and death can be determined as the important themes of Klimt's work, pursued through roughly one large-format portrait of a woman per year, rendered in the Art Nouveau principles of flatness, decoration, and gold leaf, alongside allegories and Old Testament heroines transformed into dangerous femmes fatales.
During the early years of the Secessionist movement, Klimt began incorporating gold leaf into his paintings — the development that would define his so-called "Golden Phase," with *Pallas Athena* (1898) often considered its earliest example and *Judith I* (1901) another notable milestone.
In 1903, Klimt traveled to Ravenna, where he admired the Byzantine mosaics of the Basilica San Vitale — an influence unmistakable in the height of his Golden Phase, including *Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I* (1907) and *The Kiss* (1907–08).
*The Kiss* — depicting a man and woman locked in an embrace, created using oil paint and silver, gold, and platinum leaf to produce a shimmering, mosaic effect — is now held in
About this work
The Stoclet Frieze consists of three mosaic panels: a female figure entitled *Expectation* — also known as *Waiting* or *The Dancer* — followed by *The Tree of Life*, and then an embracing couple called *Fulfilment*. In *Waiting*, a solitary woman stands in arrested motion, her body caught between stillness and the brink of movement. Apart from her upper body, which is shown en face, the dancer is seen from the side — a compositional borrowing directly from Egyptian portraiture.
The gesture and position of the figure are particularly redolent of Egyptian art, and the rich gold colour, encrusted gems, and geometric patterns in her dress make for an embellished show of sanctity and wealth.
Her hand posture emphasises the decorative headdress which, just as her bracelet, resembles designs of the Wiener Werkstätte. The figure does not command the eye so much as hold it — suspended, coiled, expectant — her ornamental gown expanding toward the ground in a cascade of tessellated pattern that dissolves the boundary between body and surface.
The Stoclet Frieze was created for a 1905–1911 commission for the Stoclet Palace in Brussels, Belgium.
Klimt produced nine full-scale preparatory cartoons in gouache, graphite, pastel, and gold on paper between 1910 and 1911, which were then translated into mosaics using enamel, mother-of-pearl, gold leaf, ceramic tiles, pearls, marble, and coloured glass by the Wiener Werkstätte. The commission arrived at the height of Klimt's Golden Phase — the same years that produced *The Kiss* and *Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I* — and the Stoclet project pushed his synthesis of painting, architecture, and decorative craft to its outer limit. With its recourse to Egyptian, Byzantine, and Japanese models, this work represents the highlight of his artistically mature output.
In the frieze, the figure of *Expectation* is spatially opposed to *Fulfilment*'s embracing lovers — a polarity between longing and its resolution that runs through Klimt's entire body of work. The surviving cartoons are preserved in the collection of the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna.
*Waiting* is a work that rewards slow rooms. Its vertical stillness and compressed, all-over pattern ask for space around it — a wall with room to breathe, lit warmly so the golds and ochres can shift across the day. It speaks to the viewer drawn to pattern as philosophy, to decoration as a form of meaning-making rather than mere ornament. The mood it sets is neither austere
