Influences on Klimt: Fernand Khnopff
The Red Lips (Les Lèvres rouges), 1897
edited photo (with pencil and other media)
25.2 × 16.8 cm
Private collection

Fernand Khnopff’s Les Lèvres rouges belongs to that intimate group of works in which he transformed a photographic source into something suspended between drawing, reverie and apparition. For Khnopff, photography was never the final destination. Instead, he treated the camera’s lens as a tool to capture a raw skeleton of reality, which he could then spiritualize and deconstruct through art. The surface of this work still carries the faint architecture of the underlying photograph. However, his hand softens and redirects it through charcoal, sanguine, pastel and pencil, creating a face that seems to hover rather than simply appear. The reworking is subtle: the lips become the quiet centre of attention, the eyes withdraw into a cool inwardness, and the surrounding space dissolves into a pale, velvety haze. This interplay between mechanical origin and ethereal finish is exactly what made his technique so admired among the Secessionists.

Khnopff’s art leans toward stillness and introspection. His figures often feel withdrawn, almost enclosed within their own inner world. They exist in total isolation. The androgynous cast of his sitters adds a gentle ambiguity to this solitude. Symbolist motifs—closed eyes, mirrored forms, muted palettes, and the recurring presence of his sister Marguerite—shape a language of emotional distance and refined melancholy. Even in a small work like Les Lèvres rouges, the atmosphere is unmistakable: a quiet dream‑state, a hint of longing, and a reluctance to fully reveal the sitter.

His connection to Vienna was decisive. When Khnopff first exhibited there in 1895, Klimt and his circle immediately recognised a sensibility that aligned with their own search for a more psychologically charged aesthetic. By the time Khnopff presented twenty‑one works at the inaugural Secession exhibition in March 1898, his influence had become part of the movement’s foundation. Klimt absorbed his symbolic clarity, his preference for frontal, iconic compositions, and his ability to combine cool detachment with ornamental richness.

This impact is visible in Klimt’s breakout masterpiece of that same year, the Portrait of Sonja Knips (1898). The still, introspective face and the iyl, dreamlike atmosphere of Knips’ portrait directly echo Khnopff’s depictions of Marguerite. Furthermore, the decorative fields around Klimt’s subsequent figures carry that same sense of patterned, symbolic enclosure pioneered by the Belgian master.

In Les Lèvres rouges, one sees the qualities that spoke so directly to Klimt: the controlled sensuality, the precise yet atmospheric handling of mixed media, and the transformation of a simple photographic likeness into a charged, emblematic presence. It is a small work, but it captures the quiet authority with which Khnopff shaped the visual language of the Secession.