The golden touch

Gustav Klimt was not only a striking portrait painter, but a decorative designer of genius, the creator of candid nudes and richly textured landscapes. It would be foolish to try to resist the beauty and popular appeal of his work, argues Craig Raine

Saturday May 24, 2008
The Guardian


Warp and weft ... Fritza Riedler (1906) by Klimt. Photograph: The Bridgeman art library/Tate


Two great portraits by Gustav Klimt, 10 years apart, with a shared secret - one of Fritza Riedler (1906), one of Friederike-Maria Beer (1916).
Fritza Riedler's hair is short, no-nonsense, very faintly unkempt with one or two escaping curls. Her teeth display a winning, subtle asymmetry. Her upper left forearm is so precise in its plumpness that you can guess her age - about 46. Her expression is warily intelligent. She might be the (quietly sexy) wife of a head of college - were she not richly arrayed like the wealthy person she is. Behind her head, Klimt has placed a secular mosaic-enamel halo, a bit like a stained-glass window, and she is sitting in a backless armchair, which has been transformed by Klimt into a decorative accessory. In the preparatory drawings, the chair is conventional enough - and you can still make out the armrests, as well as the (less readable) pleated valances at the base of the chair. In the finished portrait, however, it is a flat honeycomb of blanched-almond statue eyes, though the overall effect created by the chair is the sway of the sea, ripple and wave. Fritza Riedler emerges from the chair, her expensive, pale eau de Nil dress pouring down her, like Venus Anadyomene emerging from the ocean - goddess and bluestocking.


Friederike-Maria Beer, with her faint moustache and her pragmatic, assessing eyes, is painted against an oriental screen of battling warriors - apparently taken from a Korean vase in Klimt's possession. Her standing figure is conterminous with the teeming tapestry "behind" her. Tapestry and woman exist in the same plane. Her head and her hands are transfigured by the welter of stuff around them, stuff taken, as it were, from the dressing-up box - so they are granted nakedness. They are the only naked things. Which is not the way we usually think of faces and fingers. The shared secret of these ostensibly different portraits is - accessories, incidentals, decorative "accidentals".
From a foot away, 826 Ettrick Sporting Tweed Thrie Estaits has a clear, defined pattern, a grid of alternating brown and paler brown squares. Something simple, manly, frank. But if you look closely, the material reveals heather threads and green threads, so subtle as to be almost invisible. These are eye-shadow pastels. This is an allegory of the macro and the micro in art.

Picasso is famously various - the blue period, the pink period, cubism, analytical cubism, the neoclassical period, the surreal 30s, the postwar pro-communist kitsch welter of doves, harlequins, clowns and those lazy cartoon kings. So various, in fact, that it is difficult to see the pattern in the warp and the weft - the pattern, the template, the tweed in his work, the recurrent artistic idea. It's all apparently inchoate cornucopia, a mass of unexpected threads - Ezra Pound's "wilderness of broken mirrors".

Coleridge says in Biographia Literaria that great artists can be animated for a lifetime by one idea, one discovery. Picasso's dominating idea is sculpture - bringing the values of sculpture to the one-dimensional canvas surface with its familiar illusions of three-dimensionality and perspective. Picasso is interested in every inflection of sculpture, of different kinds of sculpture. For example, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, his brothel picture of 1907, would not be possible without the visual example of African carving. Those bold diagonal strokes representing shade down one side of the nose are a trope taken from the coarsely chiselled profiles of African art. Cubism is, in essence, an equivalent of the radically unstable viewpoint we deploy when we walk round a sculpture. Collage insists on actual three-dimensionality.

A picture such as Picasso's The Two Brothers (1906) reproduces the powdery pinks of terracotta garden sculpture in the naked boys. The little brother being piggy-backed has in the corner of his only visible eye a squidged lump of pigment - a nod, a tribute to the imperfection of swiftly worked clay. But the crucial sculptural value is present in the canvas weave itself - whose rough nubbly texture, whose burly Braille, is like unpolished granite. Small wonder, then, that Picasso should be a brilliantly original, if intermittent, sculptor all his life.

Klimt was a student at the Kunstgewerbeschule when the Viennese historical painter Hans Makart was at his most celebrated. Klimt was a fervent admirer. Makart's The Entry of Charles V into Antwerp (1878) is representative of the bombastic art that Klimt eventually rejected for a different kind of painting, which has art historians expressing baffled regret that he somehow failed to register historical background in his pictures. "One searches in vain for any sign of these momentous events in Klimt's work," writes Frank Whitford, looking for evidence of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo and the collapse of the Habsburgs and the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Klimt's flirtation with this kind of epic, overweight, overcrowded picture - somewhere between Wembley stadium and a mass grave - is pared down, spliced with symbolist aesthetic and allegory, but over-impressed by the idea of size. As if a great picture were a large picture. Beethoven Frieze (1902) was painted to showcase a monumental sculpture of Beethoven by Max Klinger. It is less pullulating than a Makart, but has fatally pompous Wagnerian elements of Nibelungenlied. In the panel known as "Longing for Happiness", for example, there is a knight, in golden armour, with a perm like Kevin Keegan's of yesteryear, apparently representing the strong führer. He is surrounded by suffering mankind, in the form of several supplicating nudes, and two female figures representing compassion and ambition.

Wagner invented the idea of the total artwork, the Gesamtkunstwerk - a notion that proved, indirectly, to be Klimt's artistic salvation. (The Ring is the ultimate control feat by a control freak.) The Viennese secession, led by Klimt, among others, was a precursor to the Bauhaus - and the idea that art could be applied to every aspect of life, much as, in 19th-century England, Pugin's Roman Catholic aesthetic was (mysteriously, solipsistically) applied to doorknobs, fire irons, floor tiles. Josef Hoffmann, an architect, designed a chair for Klimt, and monogrammed cutlery in a 106-piece set (for Lili and Fritz Waerndorfer, 1904-8), a tea and coffee set for Margaret Wittgenstein-Stonborough, cigarette boxes, vases, buckles - all in Jugendstil, the Viennese version of art nouveau. Klimt made book plates and clothing labels (for his mistress Emilie Flöge's dress business). Like Oscar Wilde, like George Bernard Shaw, he believed in dress reform. When he wasn't dressed like a banker in striped morning trousers - with a firm fistful of gloves, and holding the brim of his hat - Klimt was naked under a self-designed burnous.

What Klimt learnt from this fusion of art and craft proved to be crucial to his art - saving it from aesthetic inflation. The Gesamtkunstwerk gave him his idea, the idea that would lift him above the level of hyper-skilful painter to great artist. His greatest paintings are a conflation of two skills - extraordinary in combination, less extraordinary in isolation. Klimt was a striking portrait painter, swift to achieve a likeness, accurate to the point of genius. He was also, it transpired, a remarkable decorative designer. His paintings are very beautiful, obviously beautiful - and some, unsurprisingly, have been owned by Estée Lauder and Barbra Streisand. There is a popular appeal here - an appeal it would be snobbish and foolish to resist. Think of Matisse's vibrant charm. Or the way certain Jackson Pollocks have been annexed of late to the decorative camp (unpersuasively in my view). The beauty is all in the flat textile element. The sitters are seen exactly as they are - a different beauty, which can encompass imperfection, the ghost of a moustache, a deformed finger, awkward angularity, prominent teeth, plumpness. The beauty in the portraiture is partly the pleasure of accuracy, but more substantially the pleasure of form - form so delicately done it is almost invisible.

When form is obtrusive, it is lesser. In 1981, there was an exhibition of photographs by Helmut Newton (reprinted in Photographies 1980-1981) at the Daniel Templon gallery in rue Beaubourg, Paris. The flyer showed a nude woman, her face in profile, her body three-quarter facing the viewer. Her right breast looks us directly in the eye like a target. Her left breast is in profile, more or less. Its under-curve is echoed by the line of her rib cage as it comes to the waist. Her left arm is arranged. It has designs on us. The elbow is posed facing out - to mirror the left breast - and the back of the hand rests against the top of the pelvis. A thing never seen in nature. Utterly artificial.

Now consider Klimt's first portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (1907). The chair she sits in burns like a throne ... and enfolds her like a floor-length spreading train. She wears two bracelets on her left arm. Her throat is invisible under a choker the size of a small flowerbed. Her dress has jewelled shoulder straps. It is narrow, a kind of textile backgammon board at the bust, the body of the dress an aquarium of golden fish, of eyes like beaten gold, dense with luxury. Painters who have ambitions to paint gold - not an easy thing - should consult this Klimt. He solves the problem directly - by using gold.

Bloch-Bauer's face has a slightly retroussé mouth - full lips, handsome without being quite conventionally so. Her eyes are intelligent and grave. Klimt has painted reserve, distance - flesh and blood, sure enough, but at a lower temperature than the expression usually implies. The hands are remarkable - thin, elegant, perhaps a little cold - and arranged at once elaborately and plausibly. You feel that they are composed by the sitter, not by the artist.

But, of course, they are arranged by Klimt. Bloch-Bauer's hair is equally elaborate, equally composed, cropped at the top by the edge of the canvas. Its extraordinary outline - it might be topiary - is mirrored exactly by the shape of her two hands. Neither the hair nor the hands can be described in words. Their shared shape is so utterly out of nature, it resembles nothing except itself - an artificiality the sitter has learned to live with quite easily, quite naturally by now.

Klimt, like his disciple Egon Schiele, is also known for his candid nudes - women masturbating, semi-clothed, innuendos of lesbianism. Art historians tend to worry away at the moral propriety of these pictures. Are they titillating? They are frankly sexual in the way Donne is in "To His Mistress Going to Bed", when he instructs his mistress to "cast all white linen hence" and show herself as to a midwife. Klimt himself was unworried about proprieties, saying that the arse of one of his models was "more beautiful and intelligent ... than many faces".

Everyone knows about these nude pictures - and they are terrific - but Klimt's landscapes are greater and less appreciated. They show the conflation of textile with reality. In Farmhouse with Birches (1900), the farmhouse is relegated to the far background. The foreground is taken up with turf, and a few wild flowers. A picture of grass, then, with the trunks of four silver birches. All branches and foliage are out of the picture. On the right, a thin birch trunk runs slightly askew from the top of the canvas to the bottom. The other three trunks to the left come a third of the way down the painting. You have to look at the composition for quite a long time before you identify the textile technique involved. At first, I thought of drawn-thread work - where you pull threads in one direction to create a diaphanous line, like the ladder in a stocking. Then I realised Klimt's birch trunks are mimicking trapunto, where raised decorative matter is sewn on to/into the textile, bringing supplementary textures to the flat material.

Beeches (1900) is the familiar barcode effect, but the horizon five-eighths of the way up the painting creates the idea of a loom with warp and weft. Field of Poppies (1907) is the painterly equivalent of a pretty floral print. When we think about prints, we tend to isolate the pattern and its repeats. Klimt knew, as print designers know, that the pattern is there but is obscured by folds, by the very act of being worn. In Field of Poppies, you can hardly stop the feeling in yourself that, could Klimt's landscape only be straightened out, the slightly obscured pattern would be clearly visible - whereas, for the moment, it is merely shy but about to overcome its embarrassment and show us everything.

The Park (1909-10), which hangs in MoMA in New York, takes the idea of textile to its most radical expression. Nine-tenths of the canvas is foliage, brushstrokes, serried leaves that almost lose their source in nature and become abstract, pure pigment, printed textile close to pattern. Then, right at the very bottom of the painting, Klimt allows us to see tree trunks, dwarfed by the canopy above. The painting is like a swallow dive. I used to think that this name referred to the flight of the bird. In fact, it refers to the action of the gullet. In The Park, the eye falls the full length of the picture, headlong through space, from morn to noon, from noon to dewy eve, a summer's day, before Klimt rescues us from vertigo with a gratifying gulp, at the very last moment - returning us to the safety of suddenly recognisable reality.

· Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life in Vienna, 1900 is at Tate Liverpool from May 30 to August 31. Details: tate.org.uk/liverpool