This lecture explores a work by Gustav Klimt in a new context: the period of King Leopold II’s “Congo Free State” (1885-1908)—a distant, resource rich entity of extraction that remade Belgium into a global powerhouse. Gustav Klimt achieved what he considered the highpoint of his experiments with ornament not in Vienna, but in Brussels, where he designed, with unlimited budget, a large-scale frieze of gold and bejeweled mosaics to wrap the dining room walls for the Palais Stoclet (1905-1911). This remarkable work revitalized Klimt’s career and changed his style. The Stoclet project also concentrates myriad and unrecognized connections to Africa. Klimt became enmeshed in a web of links that tied his patron and circles of Brussels elites to the Congo and to Egypt. These shape not only the circumstances of his commission but the stylistic forms, raw materials, and figural compositions that he devised for it. Vienna, golden style, is reborn in the gold rush of Belgian empire.

By restoring imperialism to the center of the story, the lecture identifies two coordinates for our analytic field. First, the stylistic development of Klimt’s “golden style,” offering new evidence for his reliance on Egyptian tomb art for his Brussels project. Here a new link emerges between ancient Egyptian archaeology and Belgian occupation of the Congo as conduits of modernist primitivism. Second, the Stoclet house is reconceptualized as an imperial Gesamtkunstwerk, embodying not only a resplendent unity of all the arts but a voracious entitlement to global bounty, exemplified in Klimt’s patron, the triumphant Brussels banker-engineer Adolphe Stoclet. By close focus on this work of Gustav Klimt and his patron, a missing history is made visible: the facts, artifacts, sources, resources—both financial and cultural—and raw materials that are inextricably linked to European expansionism in Africa.

Debora Silverman is Distinguished Professor Emerita of History and Art History at UCLA, where she holds the University of California Presidential Chair in Modern European History, Art and Culture. Her books include Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art (Farrar, Straus & Gireux, 2000).