Gustav Klimt was an Austrian painter, born near Vienna in 1862 and dead in Vienna in 1918, who founded the Vienna Secession and painted The Kiss. He covered his canvases in real gold leaf, he was attacked over the university ceiling paintings that a fire destroyed in 1945, and his gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer sold for a reported 135 million dollars in 2006.
The Kiss is two lovers wrapped in one golden cloak, and almost anyone who types Klimt's name has seen it, on a poster, a mug or a phone case. The man who painted it did not think he was worth a portrait.
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Klimt would not explain himself. "There is no self-portrait of me," he said, and he was "convinced that as a person I'm not particularly interesting." Whoever wanted to know something about him, he told people, should look attentively at his pictures.
So the pictures had to do the talking, and the state listened. In 1908 the Ministry of Education bought The Kiss for 25,000 crowns while the exhibition where it hung was still open, a price that was high even then. Klimt had not finished the canvas. He kept adjusting it afterward.
That was the same state he had turned away three years earlier. When the University of Vienna rejected his ceiling paintings, he refused to let the ministry take them over, and in 1905 he said: "I refuse any help from the state, I will do without it all." The paintings never hung anywhere, and in May 1945 a fire destroyed them in a castle where they were stored. The painting the state paid a fortune for is the one everyone knows. The three it refused are the ones nobody alive has seen in color.
What You'll Discover
What happened in 1892.
Why the university refused its ceiling.
Where the gold really came from.
Who Emilie Flöge was to him.
What happened in his last month.