Art & Creativity Quote by Gustav Klimt

Klimt’s offhand calm here is doing a lot of work. The line performs a kind of cultivated idleness: he arrives, doesn’t rush to produce, and frames the pause as both deliberate (“as planned”) and nourishing. It’s the posture of an artist refusing the industrial clock. For a figure often treated as a symbol of Vienna’s gilded intensity, the surprise is the restraint. He doesn’t announce a revelation or a breakthrough; he “flicked through books,” “studied… a little.” The diminutives matter. They soften the ambition and, in doing so, make the method sound natural rather than strategic.

The subtext is pragmatic: this is how you build a visual vocabulary without calling it research. Klimt is signaling that influence isn’t taken in through grand pilgrimages or loud declarations, but through small, repeated acts of looking. “Japanese art” lands with particular historical charge. By Klimt’s era, Japonisme had already reshaped European composition: flat planes, emphatic contour, decorative patterning, the permission to treat surfaces as surfaces. Klimt’s later work would be celebrated (and sometimes dismissed) for its ornament and gold, but the quote suggests that what looks like opulence can begin in quiet study and selective attention.

There’s also a subtle defense tucked inside the leisure. “I took it easy” anticipates judgment: why aren’t you working? His answer is that the easing-in is part of the work, the way an eye recalibrates before a hand commits. It’s an artist narrating process as lifestyle, and lifestyle as discipline.