The branches of Gustav Klimt's Tree of Life spread across a golden field and end in curls. Looking up from the trunk, you can follow a branch until it seems about to run into another one. A small gap or a change of direction keeps the patterns distinct. The lines crowd together, then open out to make room for other shapes. It is easy to see why this ornament can hold attention on its own. Its original purpose helps explain why Klimt gave a tree so much room to travel.
The Tree of Life belongs to the decoration Klimt designed for the dining room of the Palais Stoclet, a house in Brussels designed by Josef Hoffmann. The house was planned and built in the early twentieth century for Adolphe and Suzanne Stoclet. It brought architecture, furniture, decorative objects and wall surfaces into a closely coordinated setting. Within that project, Klimt had to consider how an image would be experienced across a room. The tree was part of a larger composition with human figures and other motifs. It extended along the walls at a scale quite different from the versions familiar from reproductions.
A tree designed to fill a wall
The central trunk provides a clear point of departure. It rises in a relatively compact area before spreading into branches with long horizontal extensions. These branches bend and curl at different rates. Some make broad turns with generous spaces inside them. Others tighten into small spirals. The effect is of several speeds of growth operating at once. Look for the places where the trunk gives way to its first substantial branch and see how the available space changes from that point onwards.
The tree shares the surface with smaller marks, including shapes that resemble leaves, eyes and patches of decoration. The relation between these marks and the branches changes across the design. An isolated form can acquire great weight when it sits in a comparatively open area. A similar form partly surrounded by curls may enter the pattern before it registers as an individual detail. Klimt had control over these shifts of emphasis because he could place each small unit in a particular amount of space.
There is also a distinction between the suggestions of a living tree and the requirements of the design. A real branch can move towards the viewer and partly obscure the branches behind it. In Klimt's arrangement there is a great deal to see if your eye stays close to the plane of the wall. The branches have a recognisable origin but can be distributed like the lines of a drawing. This gives the tree room to stretch horizontally while remaining legible from a distance in the dining room.
Expectation and Fulfilment
The MAK in Vienna holds the working drawings for the Stoclet frieze. Its account describes the sweeping tree motif on the long sides of the room and explains the relationship between a dancer, known as Expectation, and an embracing pair, known as Fulfilment. These figures occupy related positions across the room. A faithful idea of the scheme therefore involves a turn of the head. A person who looks at one group can look back across the intervening space towards its companion.
The dancer has an emphatic profile, and the angular details of her costume gather around the body. Her hands make a precise gesture that stands out against the ornament. Take a moment to make your own distinction between the parts that describe her movement and the parts that give rhythm to the design around her. The same line can sometimes do both jobs. A turn in the fabric can suggest the position of a limb while connecting the figure to a nearby pattern.
The embracing figures offer a different distribution of attention. Their clothes carry much of the ornament, while the exposed parts of their bodies are limited to comparatively small areas. The visible faces and hands acquire intimacy from the amount of pattern around them. In one group the sharp edges and emphatic gesture can carry the sense of anticipation. In the other the meeting of two bodies gives a centre to the surrounding decoration. The familiar titles invite that reading and the positions of the figures help sustain it.
The tree helps link the different experiences of looking. Its branches can be followed quite independently of either figure. Return to one of the figures after following a branch and you may see a correspondence between a gesture and the turn of a line nearby. The point is less about finding a secret code than about seeing why a design for the entire room could make use of both kinds of form. Figures give the room moments of concentration. The branches give the eye routes between them.
Working drawing and finished mosaic
Many familiar images of the Tree of Life come from the surviving designs. Klimt made full-size working drawings that conveyed the look of the composition along with instructions for turning it into mosaic. He could work out the sweep of a line, the spacing of smaller shapes and the way one section met another on paper. The finished decoration required other skills and a different set of physical decisions. There is a gap between indicating a bright passage on a working drawing and arranging materials that will actually respond to the light in a room.
The MAK records Klimt's instructions for materials including enamel, mother-of-pearl and gold leaf. Each offers a different kind of brightness. Mother-of-pearl can change appearance as light moves over it. A gold surface can register as an even area from one position and become more insistent when the angle changes. The importance of these effects increases when a viewer has room to walk along the motifs or look at them from across the room. An image on a printed page can record many details while holding light and viewpoint steady.
This distinction also explains why descriptions of the Tree of Life sometimes sound as though they concern different objects. One writer has in mind an individual working drawing, another the extended mosaic in Brussels, and another a reproduction cropped around the best-known branches. All may refer to the same underlying design. The things a viewer can actually see differ with the object being described. Size, material, placement and the relationship with the rest of the frieze are worth specifying whenever one of these versions is under discussion.
The place of ornament in Klimt's work
The Stoclet commission emerged from a period of collaboration among artists, designers and workshops associated with the Vienna Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte. For a house like this, an architectural opening, the proportions of a wall and the sequence of surfaces mattered to a decorative scheme. An artwork could affect how a visitor experienced the room and also take some of its own character from the arrangement of that room. Hoffmann's design and Klimt's frieze offer different kinds of order within the same setting.
Klimt had developed ways of placing recognisable figures against complex areas of pattern in several works. Viewers familiar with The Kiss may recognise how convincingly a face or hand can emerge from a surrounding surface full of small shapes. The Stoclet commission gave him much more horizontal space and a reason to think about what could be seen from multiple positions. Details could be precise enough to reward a close approach and form part of broad arrangements that someone across the room could read. The extended branches answer both situations.
The working drawings also give an impression of the labour involved in controlling ornament on this scale. Repeating a curl over a broad area sounds simple until one considers what each version must do. It can fill an awkward space, give a line a clear ending, leave a figure a zone of relative quiet or lead the eye farther towards the edge. Changes of density keep the work from becoming visually even. The small adjustments can be appreciated independently of the luxury of the materials.
Looking at the motif before interpreting it
Trees have been used to carry ideas about life, descent and renewal in several artistic traditions. Klimt's choice makes those associations available, and the branches seem to invite them by spreading so persistently across the wall. A viewer may associate the tree with growth and continuity. Another may notice the spaces and distinct turns and think about the ways a life can branch. These responses gain substance by connecting them to a part of the design a viewer can point to.
One place to begin is a branch that seems to curl back towards the trunk. Its direction gives a sense of return, although the stem that supports it has travelled away from the centre. Look for another that reaches further out before turning. The two leave different kinds of space around them. The branch and its surrounding opening can appear almost equally prominent. Considering the work in this way makes the tree's capacity to contain different tempos easier to grasp.
Pay similar attention to the smaller shapes scattered among the branches. The associations they invite may be vivid, especially when a form resembles an eye or a bird. Their placement has a visual function even before any particular meaning is attached to them. A dark shape placed well away from a busy line can act like a pause. A series of small marks close together can give a branch more movement or make a gap feel full. The design allows interpretation to grow out of the material evidence rather than depending on a fixed meaning for every shape.
Seeing more than the familiar crop
Start with the largest image of the scheme you can find and identify the areas that tend to disappear from cropped reproductions. Place the tree in relation to a figure before focusing on the spirals. From a distance the weight of an area of pattern can tell you how much room the figure is given. At a closer scale, look for a small hand, a face or an isolated dark form. Take note of how much surrounding space you need to see before its position makes sense.
The designers made the dining room for people who would occupy it over time. Guests could encounter the mural on entering, from their seats and as they moved through the space. An extended composition makes those different encounters possible. The tree's spreading structure can govern the first impression, while the small details offer things a person might register much later. Even on the page, a similar shift takes place when one moves between the whole image and a detail of a single branch. The change of scale is a good way to understand why the design has remained so memorable even when seen away from its architectural setting.
One detail worth looking for in the wider scheme is the figure identified by the MAK as the Knight. It occupied the end wall of the room, giving the eye a further destination beyond the long walls with their branches and human groups. Its more abstract treatment makes a useful comparison with the dancer. Spend time first with a shape that clearly describes a body, then look at how little description some of the other areas need before they suggest a figure. In a room whose design is already full of repeated units, even a relatively abstract body can give the viewer a place to stop. The variation helps explain how the frieze could hold together at the scale of architecture and still offer distinct encounters at each wall.
For a closer look at the motif and its place in Klimt's work, see Gustav Klimt’s Tree of Life at The History of Art.
