Fulfillment

Fulfillment is one of the preparatory cartoons Klimt executed for the Stoclet Frieze, the monumental decorative programme he designed for the dining room of the Palais Stoclet in Brussels, built by Josef Hoffmann from 1905 to 1911. The frieze was executed in mosaic by the Wiener Werkstätte and remains one of the greatest total artworks of the Vienna Secession — the integration of painting, architecture, metalwork, and decorative craft into a unified aesthetic environment. Fulfillment depicts a couple locked in a close embrace, wrapped in a single ornamental garment of extraordinary richness; it is the pendant to Expectation, which shows a standing female figure in isolation. Together they represent the longing and completion that also animate The Kiss. The MAK — Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna — holds the cardboard cartoon, which allowed craftsmen to scale up the mosaic design. Klimt used coloured papers, gold paint, and metallic pigments on the cartoon to approximate the eventual mosaic's material richness. The couple in Fulfillment, unlike the Kiss, is seen from above and behind, the two figures merging into a single ornamental unit that makes the embrace both intimate and monumental. The Stoclet Frieze represents Klimt's most complete achievement in the field of applied art and the fullest realisation of the Secession's Gesamtkunstwerk ideal.

Tempera, watercolour, gold, silver, bronze paint, chalk, and pencil on cardboard — a mixed media cartoon designed to guide mosaic fabrication. The surface combines drawn line, painted flat colour areas, and applied metallic paint to simulate the tesserae arrangement. Klimt works with sharp geometric ornamental units for the garments alongside the rounded organic forms of the figures.