The Waifs of Gustav Klimt

The secret to Klimt’s enduring popularity is his ability to take the internal life of his figures and project it into an external image. Klimt works with bright colors and abstract shapes to create a visual image of the emotional state felt by the people he represents. His most popular image is also his most extreme in this regard. In The Kiss, Klimt reduces his human figures to their absolute minimum, in terms of realistic representation.We see their hands, their faces, a shoulder, some feet, mostly focusing on the areas of intense awareness during the moment of kissing.

When Klimt does portray a more complete human figure, as in this detail from Sea Serpents, it is most likely a waify, almost emaciated woman, the sort of person we might mistake for the anorexic actress, and it shows how women with a bad body image can imagine they are overweight even when they are deathly thin. In a body of this size, any amount of fat can look out of proportion, such as the woman’s thigh. But Klimt shows us this woman is comfortable, so secure that the strength of her eyes challenges us to enter the roiling sea of her emotion.

Although women of this body type are among the most common candidates for breast augmentation, Klimt shows us in this Portrait of Emile Floge that proportion can be easily maintained with the proper clothing, clothes that give volume and femininity to a slender frame.