The Magic of Line: Gustav Klimt's Artistic Process

The starkness of a hand-drawn line—with its potential for lyrical beauty—is essential to Gustav Klimt's art. Through line, Klimt sought to convey the essence of the human form, and the nature of human existence. As an artist he wanted to explore universal emotions like suffering, hope and love; and it was through the daily practice of life-drawing that he cultivated his ideas. Learn more about Klimt's artistic process in this video.

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SPEAKER: The starkness
of a hand-drawn line,
with its potential
for lyrical beauty,
is essential to
Gustav Klimt's art.
Through line, Klimt
sought to convey
the essence of the human
form, and the nature
of human existence.
LEE HENDRIX: As an
artist, Klimt wanted
to explore universal emotions,
like suffering, hope, and love.
And it was through the daily
practice of life drawing
that he cultivated his ideas.

SPEAKER: While sketching
nude models in his studio,
he experimented with poses,
gestures, and expressions,
refining them until he
reached a perfect pitch
of emotional intensity, which he
then conveyed through painting.
LEE HENDRIX: As far
as we know, Klimt
did not write about his art,
yet we do know something
about how he worked.
He used an adjustable easel
to draw from various angles.
He posed models on a bed so
that their languorous bodies
could suggest floating,
a motif that's
very important in his art.
SPEAKER: The fluid
and linear style
we think of as Klimt's
wasn't always that way.
He was a gifted artist,
who for many years
worked as a decorative painter
of interiors, in a style that
might surprise us
today, yet suited
the prevailing conservative
taste in art at that time.
LEE HENDRIX: The
painting that dominated
Vienna in the late
1800s was tightly
controlled and realistic.
It involved
three-dimensional modeling.
It involved glorifying
important moments from the past.
SPEAKER: One of the
most striking examples
of Klimt's early
style is a mural
that represents an event
from theater history,
the staging of Romeo and Juliet
in Shakespeare's Old Globe
Theater and the related
preparatory drawings of actors
in Renaissance costume.

Klimt had an eye for seemingly
opposite tastes, opulent,
but also spare.
He admired the art
of other cultures
of the past and present,
especially those
that emphasized surface,
pattern, and line.

By the mid-1890s, Klimt and
like-minded Austrian artists
separated from the conservative
Viennese art establishment.
They admired a new style
of art emerging in Europe,
what is now called symbolism.
Klimt was especially
influenced by the work
of several Belgian
and Dutch artists,
Fernand Khnopff's enigmatic
children and erotic women,
Jan Toorop's gaunt floating
females, and George Minne's
angular expressive males.

LEE HENDRIX: The
symbolists were interested
in the psychological,
areas of exploration
that for Klimt the
practice of figure drawing
perfectly supported,
as his own style began
to radically change.
SPEAKER: Symbolism emphasized
a dream world, often expressed
through soft focus
effects, such as
in his 1898 drawing
of a young woman
gazing pensively
toward the viewer.
The cloudy effect of
her hair is created
by a technique of smudging black
chalk into the paper grain.

Klimt made this sketch only a
few years later, around 1901,
after his symbolist style
was firmly established.
It was used as the basis
for a painting in which you
notice figures floating in
a kind of dreamlike state.
LEE HENDRIX: As Klimt
saw it, floating
through life with no
control over destiny
is the essence of
the human condition.
Although the seductive young
woman sinks like a stone
to the bottom of
the stream, her hair
appears suspended in water.
These sketches combine
experimentation
with careful observation.
They show how Klimt honed
his technique and his ideas
in order to communicate
exactly what he wanted to say.

SPEAKER: Klimt's life
drawings offer great insight
into his working process, a
lifetime of careful observation
of the human form, honed to
a simple, thoughtful line.
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