Expectation

Expectation is Klimt's most celebrated work on paper at large scale — a preparatory cartoon executed around 1905–09 for the Stoclet Frieze, the monumental mosaic program commissioned by Belgian industrialist Adolphe Stoclet for the dining room of his Palais Stoclet in Brussels, designed by Josef Hoffmann of the Wiener Werkstätte. The frieze was executed in the Wiener Werkstätte's workshops using enamel, coral, semi-precious stones, and gold on a marble ground, making it among the most materially extravagant decorative programs of the twentieth century. Expectation depicts a standing female figure in an exuberant spiral costume, one of two primary figural elements in the frieze (the other being Fulfilment, showing a couple in embrace). The cartoon was executed in mixed media on paper at full scale to allow the Wiener Werkstätte craftsmen to translate it into mosaic. It is held at the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, the institution that has most comprehensively documented the Wiener Werkstätte's production. Expectation represents the absolute apogee of Klimt's ornamental figural style: the human body is almost entirely consumed by pattern, with only the face and hands legible as flesh, the rest dissolving into spiralling geometric abstraction.

Mixed media on paper (tempera, watercolour, gold paint, silver paint, chalk, and pencil) at monumental scale. The work demonstrates Klimt's capacity to orchestrate multiple decorative registers simultaneously: Egyptian hieratic profiles, Byzantine mosaic logic, Japanese textile pattern, and Art Nouveau organic geometry coexist in a single figure. The gold and silver areas catch light differently from the opaque tempera, replicating the mosaic's material play.