Gustav Klimt
Vienna’s golden decorator.
Klimt led the Vienna Secession, which broke with the Academy. He combined painting with gold, ornament and eroticism.
Gustav Klimt was born in 1862 in Baumgarten outside Vienna. His father was a gold engraver, and the family was not wealthy. Gustav studied at the School of Applied Arts in Vienna and, together with his brother Ernst and his friend Franz Matsch, set up a workshop for decorative painting. Among other things they executed paintings in the Burgtheater and in the staircase of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. During the 1880s he worked in a fairly traditional, academic style and received an imperial award for his work in the Burgtheater.
In 1897 Klimt helped found the Vienna Secession and became its first president. The group broke with the conservative art establishment and sought to unite all the arts. It acquired its own exhibition building with the golden dome. There, in 1902, his Beethoven Frieze was shown, which is still in place.
Klimt was commissioned to paint three ceiling paintings for the University of Vienna on philosophy, medicine and jurisprudence. The pictures, with naked bodies and dark symbolism, caused a scandal and were never installed. They were destroyed in a fire in 1945.
His golden period, around 1905–1910, is the best known. He used gold leaf, patterns and flat ornament around realistically painted faces and hands, inspired by Byzantine mosaics he had seen in Ravenna. The Kiss of 1907–1908 is in the Belvedere in Vienna. The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer of 1907 was stolen by the Nazis and returned in 2006 to the owner’s heirs. It is now in the Neue Galerie in New York. He also painted many landscapes during his summers at Lake Attersee. For the banker Adolphe Stoclet he made a large mosaic frieze in a palace in Brussels, incorporating gold, enamel and semi-precious stones.
Klimt never married, but had a lifelong relationship with the fashion designer Emilie Flöge and fathered several children with other women. He supported younger artists, among them Egon Schiele. He died after a stroke in 1918. Today he is one of the most popular artists in the world and a symbol of Vienna around 1900.