Klimt's Female Portraits

He paid tribute to female beauty in his works like no other artists, and always placed feminine attractiveness at the center of his creative work. It seems significant that Klimt very rarely painted male portraits. In addition, his few male portraits only emerged during the artist's very early creative period. Klimt almost always painted portraits of women.

In his female portraits, Klimt's creative techniques vary in frequency and speed. This is not the case with the allegorical pictures or the landscapes in Klimt's oeuvre. The master artist looked for new ideas with every portrait. No composition is the same. Each portrait was accompanied by a multitude of pencil studies, which Klimt used to develop his seemingly perfect physical poses and often individual details such as hand positionings as well. As long as these studies exist, it is possible to reconstruct Klimt's struggle to create the best-possible compositions for his portraits.

These workings show how conscientiously Klimt handled each of his portraits. A portrait would always take a long time to create—sometimes even years. When creating them, Klimt always painted with the real model in front of him. Klimt's portraits are like precious treasures: they combine an ideal composition with the highest painting finesse.

Clients were willing to pay many times more than what other painters could demand for portraits for the great amount of effort Klimt put into every female portrait. Karl Wittgenstein, who commissioned the portrait of his daughter Margaret with the master in 1905, paid 10,000 crowns.

This was a huge sum, considering that average earnings, such as a school teacher's salary, only amounted to around 1,200 crowns for a whole year. And at the time, for example, 40,000 crowns could buy a stately villa in the Salzkammergut with all the furnishings. Klimt was one of the highest-earning artists of his time.

The early portraits Klimt created in the 1880s and 1890s are characterized by a high degree of realism. In fact, Klimt's style was based on portrait photography. This tendency toward high levels of realism in the young artist's presentation increased in the early 1890s, approaching an almost photo-realistic style. Examples include the portrait of a young girl in the Leopold Museum and the portrait of a lady in the Vienna Museum (identified as the portrait of Mrs. Heymann).

A short time later, however, Klimt renounced this miniature photo-realistic technique and turned to a method that has the characteristics of an impressionist style of painting. Contours are often only vaguely hinted at, the faces of those presented appear out of dim surroundings as if blurred, and the figures seem to merge with the background.

An outstanding example of Klimt's new style is undoubtedly the 1897/98 portrait of Sonja Knips, located in the Belvedere collection in Vienna. In addition to the soft design of the pink silk dress which has been painted to perfection, the mysterious look the person depicted gives the viewer is also captivating.

In the portrait of Klimt's close companion Emilie Flöge, the decoration of her entire, strikingly slim-fitting dress takes over, and her headdress also transforms into an exotic-looking structure. The artist thereby transforms the female figure into a slender, fish-like being.

In this portrait of his partner who was very important to him, Klimt puts the impressionistic character of his previous portraits aside for the first time and replaces it with a striking stylization of shapes.

The portraits in a sfumato style from around 1900 were followed by portraits from 1905 at the latest which then, unlike the previous works, surprised with their precise and sharp contours. The visual sharpness and clarity of these pictures is reinforced above all by their backgrounds, which often had sharp-edged, geometric motifs. Squares, wavy lines, and spirals could be found in great variety; for example, as design elements for seating, furniture, and backgrounds.

In the portrait of Fritza Riedler, for example, the striking geometric patterns of the armchair and wall partition contrast beautifully with the extraordinarily realistic rendering of the person portrayed.

A highlight in this ambivalence of abstract geometric surface elements and the strikingly realistic portrayal of people is the famous portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. In this painting, not only is the background covered by rich geometric decorations, but the dress as well. The exceptional use of real gold leaf, adorning both the dress and the armchair and background in this picture and in this sheer quantity, gives the picture an almost magical and iconic character.

The female portraits painted by Klimt after 1910, as in earlier portraits, feature an abundance of decorative elements. However, their design is different as Klimt no longer used geometric patterns in his later years. He instead preferred to use organic elements as forms of decoration. In particular, floral motifs were often used as a pattern for the clothes and wallpaper-like backgrounds.

A series of preliminary sketches of the painting clarify how Klimt gradually decided on the final pose of the girl.

A few preparatory studies for the portrait of Amalie Zuckerkandl that have survived show how Klimt ended up at the subject's final pose. The version in the painting shows a high degree of symmetry and strictness in the composition of the person portrayed.

Klimt's female portraits that were created without actually being commissioned are especially magnificent. In these portraits, the painter evidently enjoys the freedom of not being limited by his clients' expectations and was able to give full shape to his ideal image of female beauty. Unfortunately, the identity of most of the people depicted is not known. They were often models that were available to the master for nude studies.