Nine Working Drawings for the Execution of a Frieze for the Dining Room of Stoclet House in Brussels

Palais Stoclet (also known as the Stoclet House) in Brussels was planned between 1905 and 1911 by Josef Hoffmann in the style of the Vienna Secession and decorated by him and a great number of Wiener Werkstätte members, as well as others from that circle, in keeping with the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Not only the building and the interior design, but in fact the entire decorating scheme is permeated by a synthesis of the three arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, wholly in keeping with the spirit of the Wiener Werkstätte. For the interior decorating, the best-known artists of the period around 1900 were called upon—including Carl Otto Czeschka, Eduard Josef Wimmer-Wisgrill, and Ludwig Heinrich Jungnickel. The commission to do the dining room walls went to Gustav Klimt. Klimt’s years of work on this project produced nine working drawings at a scale of 1:1 that were then realized as mosaics. The motif of a sweeping tree of life on the long side of the room is mirrored on the opposite wall; the Dancer (Expectation) corresponds to the Lovers (Fulfillment) across from her. The front end of the room contains the abstract figure of the Knight. For these friezes’ execution by the Wiener Werkstätte and the Wiener Mosaikwerkstätte [Vienna Mosaic Workshop] Forstner, Klimt handwrote on the drawings instructions according to which only the finest materials—such as enamel, mother-of-pearl, and gold leaf—were to be used. This work is among the few that Klimt did at a monumental scale, and with its recourse to Egyptian, Byzantine, and Japanese models, it represents the climax of his artistically mature output.