Beyond The Kiss: The Klimt and Schiele Rooms Most Visitors Walk Straight Past

The wall you queue for — and the twenty-three Klimts you don’t

The Kiss earns its crowd. Painted in 1908/09 at the summit of Klimt’s golden period, one hundred and eighty centimetres square and worked with real gold leaf, it is the painting the Belvedere itself frames as the centre of the collection, and the operator lists Klimt first among the Upper Belvedere’s masters for a reason. But the museum’s two dozen Klimt paintings around it document the entire arc of the artist — the academic prodigy of the 1880s, the Secession founder of 1897, the gold-ground years, the society portraitist, and the landscape painter almost nobody comes to Vienna expecting.

The practical consequence: the room containing The Kiss concentrates nearly all of the floor’s congestion, while the adjacent Klimt galleries — a few paces away through the enfilade — stay workable even at midday. In our concierge experience the pattern rarely fails: visitors wait out the scrum at the famous wall, then find themselves nearly alone with paintings from the same hand, the same years, sometimes the same model. If your time slot lands in the busy middle of the day, invert the route — do the surrounding Klimt and Schiele rooms first, and return to The Kiss when a tour-group wave recedes. The painting does not get less golden at 14:40 than at 14:10, and the rooms around it reward the patience.

Judith: the gold that came first

Seven years before The Kiss, Klimt painted the picture that announced the golden manner: Judith from 1901, the biblical widow who beheaded an Assyrian general, rendered as a contemporary Viennese woman in a collar of gold against a gold-ground field. The Belvedere pairs the two golden icons in its own telling of the collection — The Kiss and Judith are the works the museum names together — and seeing Judith immediately before or after the famous square is the single most instructive comparison the building offers. Where The Kiss uses gold for rapture, Judith uses it for menace: the same material, the opposite temperature.

Stand close and the picture explains why contemporaries found Klimt unnerving. The face is not an antique heroine’s but a specific, modern one, eyes half closed, lips parted, the severed head of Holofernes cropped almost casually at the frame’s lower edge. The gold is not background but atmosphere — Klimt had watched the mosaics of the Byzantine tradition and understood that a gold field abolishes depth and time. Visitors who give Judith five unhurried minutes tend to see The Kiss differently afterwards: less as a romantic postcard, more as the culmination of a decade-long experiment in what gold does to a human figure. The queue at the famous wall rarely extends here; that is the crowd’s loss.

The society portraits and the Attersee summers

Klimt’s income came from portraiture, and the Belvedere holds defining examples of the trade he transformed. The portrait of Sonja Knips from 1898 marks the beginning: a young woman in a cloud of pink caught rising from her chair, painted the year after Klimt co-founded the Vienna Secession, with the asymmetric composition and psychological alertness that would make him the portraitist of Vienna’s haute bourgeoisie. The later portrait of Fritza Riedler shows the mature system — a face of complete realism embedded in flattened, ornamental architecture — the formula that reached its famous extreme in the gold portraits of the same era. These rooms are where you watch a painter dismantle the nineteenth-century portrait piece by piece.

Then there are the landscapes, the least expected pleasure of the floor. Klimt spent his summers on the Attersee in the Salzkammergut, and painted the lake, its orchards and villa gardens in dense square canvases with almost no sky — nearer to tapestry or mosaic than to conventional landscape. The Belvedere’s Attersee pictures are serene in a way nothing else by Klimt quite is: no models, no commissions, no Vienna. Visitors who know the artist only from the gold tend to stop mid-room when they meet them. As with everything on this floor, the hang rotates with exhibitions, but the landscapes are a fixture of the collection’s story and some are normally on view.

Egon Schiele: Death and the Maiden, The Embrace, The Family

A few rooms from The Kiss hangs the collection that would justify the ticket on its own: the Belvedere’s Egon Schiele holdings, the anguished counter-voice to Klimt’s gold. Death and the Maiden from 1915 is the pivot of the group — a man and woman clinging on a ragged white sheet over a cliff-coloured void, painted at one and a half by one point eight metres, read almost universally against Schiele’s parting from his companion Wally Neuzil and his conscription into the war. Where Klimt’s embracing couple dissolves into ornament, Schiele’s grips like a field dressing. The two paintings hang in the same building, made seven years apart in the same city, and together they bracket everything Vienna 1900 was.

The Embrace from 1917 shows what Schiele might have become: a couple entwined on rumpled sheets, the draughtsmanship still electric but the mood turned, for once, tender. And The Family from 1918 — a crouching man, woman and child stacked into a pyramid — carries the heaviest biography in the museum. It was one of the last oil paintings Schiele completed before the Spanish influenza killed him on 31 October 1918, at twenty-eight, three days after it killed his pregnant wife Edith. The picture he left is the gentlest thing he ever painted. Give this room the time you budgeted for the queue; alongside these, the museum’s Schiele group includes further paintings such as the 1917 landscape Four Trees, and the rooms are rarely crowded in the way the golden wall is.

The biographical frame makes these rooms heavier and better. Klimt and Schiele were not merely colleagues in a movement; the older painter championed the younger from Schiele's teenage years, and Vienna's art world treated them as its two poles — the master of surface and the master of nerve. Then 1918 took both. Klimt died in February of that year in the aftermath of a stroke as influenza swept the city; Schiele died on 31 October, twenty-eight years old, three days after his wife Edith, with The Family still in his studio. The armistice that ended the war — and with it the empire whose capital had incubated the whole movement — came less than a fortnight later. Walking from the golden rooms into the Schiele gallery is therefore a walk across a civilisational break, and the Belvedere is the one museum where you can make that walk between the movement's two defining figures at full strength. Visitors who read nothing else on the floor should read the dates on these two walls: the entire story runs barely two decades, and it ends all at once.

Messerschmidt’s heads, a van Gogh, and eight hundred years underneath

The operator’s own shortlist of Upper Belvedere masters runs Klimt, Schiele, Funke, Messerschmidt and van Gogh — and the last three are the names visitors skip at their cost. Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s character heads, sculpted in the eighteenth century, are a series of metal and alabaster self-portrait busts contorted into extreme grimaces — yawning, scowling, clenched — that look less like Baroque sculpture than like something made last year. They are among the strangest objects in any European museum and a guaranteed hit with anyone whose attention is flagging, children included. The van Gogh and the paintings of Helene Funke — a painter the museum has worked to restore to prominence — reward the visitor who reads wall labels; the collection sweeps from medieval devotional carving through Baroque, Biedermeier and Impressionism to Vienna 1900, some eight hundred years of art under one roof. The heads carry a biography as strange as their faces: Messerschmidt sculpted the series in isolation late in his life, and art historians have argued ever since about whether they map a private system of expressions or something closer to compulsion. Either way, no photograph prepares you for meeting a row of them at eye level.

A workable route for a two-to-three-hour visit: climb to the first floor at your entry time and go directly to the Klimt galleries around the Marble Hall — famous wall first if the room is quiet, neighbours first if it is not — then the Schiele rooms, then Messerschmidt and the surrounding galleries, and finish on the ground floor’s earlier collections on your way out. The building empties from the top down as tour groups chase the gold; moving with the grain of the crowd rather than against it is worth more than any amount of elbowing. And if the famous wall defeats you at midday, remember that the museum sells time as well as art: the first hour after the 09:00 opening and the last before closing belong to visitors who planned for them.