Modern Age
Gustav Klimt (1862–1918)
Austrian Vienna Secession painter.
Gustav Klimt was the presiding genius of fin-de-siècle Vienna, a decorator's son who turned the ornamental crafts he was trained in into a private modern language of gold, pattern, and desire. He began as a successful academic muralist, painting staircases and theatre ceilings with his brother and a partner, but a crisis of conviction pushed him toward something stranger. In 1897 he and a group of younger artists broke from the conservative Künstlerhaus to found the Vienna Secession, whose building carried the motto 'To every age its art, to art its freedom.'
The scandal of his career came with the three 'Faculty Paintings' — Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence — commissioned for the University of Vienna around 1900. Their swirling nudes and pessimistic allegory were denounced as ugly and pornographic; Klimt eventually bought them back and never accepted a public commission again. Freed of officialdom, he entered his 'golden phase', fusing the flat splendour of Byzantine mosaics he had seen at Ravenna with an intensely Viennese eroticism. 'The Kiss', 'Judith', and the shimmering society portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer belong to these years.
Klimt died of a stroke in 1918, at the end of the empire whose luxuries and anxieties he had painted. In 1945 the three Faculty Paintings, stored at Schloss Immendorf, were destroyed by fire as retreating SS troops burned the castle — so that his most notorious works survive only in black-and-white photographs. His influence on the younger Egon Schiele, and on the whole idea of the decorative as a serious modern mode, outlived that loss entirely.
The words the record keeps using: sensuous, ornamental, luminous, erotic, melancholic, opulent.
At a glance
- Lived 1862–1918
- Origin Austrian
- Worked in Vienna
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Vienna Secession
- Mediums Fresco, Oil on canvas
- Techniques Gold ground and assist
Works in the archive
- Judith I, 1901 (Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna)
Klimt recasts the biblical heroine who beheaded the Assyrian general Holofernes as a Viennese femme fatale, half-lidded and flushed with erotic triumph, the severed head barely visible at the lower right. Set in a… - Beethoven Frieze (detail: This Kiss to the Whole World), 1901 (Secession Building, Vienna)
Klimt's contribution to the Secession's 1902 exhibition honouring Beethoven, painted directly on the gallery walls as a Gesamtkunstwerk to be seen for a single show. This closing detail — 'This Kiss to the Whole World',… - The Kiss, 1907 (Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna)
The summit of Klimt's golden phase and one of the most reproduced paintings in the world. A kneeling couple embrace at the edge of a flowering meadow, wrapped in a single mantle of gold; the man's ornament is a grid of… - Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907 (Neue Galerie, New York)
The 'golden Adele', commissioned by the sugar industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer for his wife. Adele's pale, sharply individual face and hands emerge from a dazzling cascade of gold, spirals, and Egyptian-eye motifs.…
What was said
Der Zeit ihre Kunst. Der Kunst ihre Freiheit. (To every age its art, to art its freedom.)
Klimt wrote that there was nothing remarkable to say about himself and that he had never painted a self-portrait; anyone who wanted to know something about him as an artist, he said, ought to look carefully at his pictures instead of at his life.
Klimt's three University Faculty Paintings — Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence — were condemned as obscene and pessimistic when shown around 1900–1901; Klimt bought them back, and they were destroyed by fire at Schloss Immendorf in May 1945, surviving only in photographs.
What would Gustav make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Gustav Klimt", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Gustav · Keep a life moment the way Gustav would · Pictures made after Gustav