This type of stunning work is what Klimt is famous for and was produced during his ‘Golden Period’. Although highly original, there are also many obvious influences from the early Modernists.
The integrity of the painting is achieved without traditional perspective or ‘illusionist tricks’ to create depth or form. Instead, the depth and perspective are achieved through intricate patterning and a receding scale of repeated motifs. Klimt has not merely liberated colour by the use of line, he has gone beyond this and instead of using blocks of flat colour has introduced luscious decorative patterns and symbols. This gives an expressionistic effect and engages first emotionally and then intellectually with the viewer.
Some of the symbols have magical and mystical meanings, particularly the repeated motif of the eye in a pyramid, associated with Freemasonry and the Illuminati, and can still be found on the American dollar. Apparently, Adele Bloch-Bauer had a slight deformity of the hands, but instead of choosing a pose to hide them, as many portraitists may have done, Klimt presents them as they are but poses them in such a way that seems natural and enhances the sitter’s beauty.
Klimt was very popular with young women clients and was offered more commissions than he could take. One reason why he was so popular with women was his sensitivity and response to feminine beauty and the ‘immortality’ a Klimt portrait represented. He captured their beauty, freezing it in time as well as literally clothing the figure in gold, which has an intrinsic value, does not corrode and is a symbol of eternity… The gold is layered over painted areas and then detail is etched in with a stylus. In Ghost of a Flea (1820), William Blake had experimented, on a much smaller scale, with similar techniques of burnishing gold leaf into a painting and then over painting and scratching back the surface.
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