Gustav Klimt: The Complete Story
Gustav Klimt (1862 to 1918) was the Austrian painter who covered Vienna in gold, scandal and desire, and made The Kiss, the most reproduced love painting in the world.
He broke from the official art world to lead the Vienna Secession, painted naked truth onto a university ceiling and got cancelled for it, and left behind a portrait that would later become the most expensive painting ever sold at the time.
Behind the gold leaf is a stranger, wilder story than the posters suggest. Here is the whole man.
Klimt in sixty seconds
Lived: 1862 to 1918, born and died in Vienna, dead at 55.
Famous for: The Kiss, the Tree of Life, and the golden portraits.
Movement: he founded and led the Vienna Secession.
Signature: real gold leaf, learned from his father the gold engraver.
Scandal: his university paintings were rejected, then burned by the SS in 1945.
The gold engraver's son
Klimt grew up poor in a suburb of Vienna. His father was a gold engraver, and the boy learned early how to handle metal leaf and ornament.
He trained as a decorative painter and started out doing respectable ceilings for theaters and museums. He was good, conventional, and on his way to a safe career. Then he blew it up.
The Secession and the break with Vienna
In 1897 Klimt and a group of younger artists walked out of the conservative art establishment and founded the Vienna Secession.
Their motto, carved over the door of their new building, read: to every age its art, to art its freedom. Klimt became their first president and the face of modern art in Austria. He was now a provocateur. He embraced Symbolism, dreamlike and erotic, against everything the academy wanted.
The Golden Phase
After a trip to Ravenna, where he saw the glittering Byzantine mosaics, Klimt began pressing real gold leaf into his paintings.
The result was his Golden Phase, around 1899 to 1910, the most famous decade of his life. It produced The Kiss, two lovers wrapped in a single golden cloak. Why he reached for actual gold is its own story: why Klimt painted in gold. The technique itself is gilding.
The scandal that got him cancelled
Around 1900 Klimt was commissioned to paint three huge ceiling panels for the University of Vienna: Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence.
He gave them naked bodies, despair and sex instead of noble reason. Professors signed a petition against them. Klimt returned the fee, took the paintings back, and never accepted a public commission again. The works met a grim end: retreating SS troops burned them in a castle in 1945. We only have black and white photographs.
Woman in Gold and the Nazis
His golden portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer, a Viennese society hostess, became one of the most fought over paintings in history.
The Nazis looted it from her Jewish family in 1938. Decades later her niece, Maria Altmann, sued the Austrian state to get it back, and won. It sold for around 135 million dollars, a record at the time. The full saga is here: Klimt's Woman in Gold. For another famous stolen masterpiece, read the mafia and the missing Caravaggio.
The women, the cats and Emilie
Klimt rarely left his studio, and when he worked he often wore a long robe with nothing underneath.
He was surrounded by models, kept cats wandering through the studio, and made hundreds of frank erotic drawings. He never married, fathered several children by different women, and yet his great lifelong companion was the designer Emilie Floge, who may never have been his lover at all.
The Tree of Life and the Stoclet Frieze
One of his most copied images is not a painting on canvas at all.
The Tree of Life comes from a mosaic frieze he designed for a private mansion in Brussels, the Stoclet Palace. Its swirling golden branches now sell on more posters and mugs than almost anything he made.
The year that erased a generation
In early 1918 Klimt suffered a stroke that paralyzed one side of his body.
Weakened, he caught the Spanish flu sweeping the world and died in February, at 55. The full story of that end is here: how Gustav Klimt died. Vienna lost much of its art world the same year.
The protege: Egon Schiele
Klimt mentored a raw young talent named Egon Schiele, giving him models, buyers and encouragement.
Schiele pushed Klimt's eroticism into something harsher and more modern. He died in the same 1918 flu pandemic, just months after his master.
Common questions about Klimt
What is Klimt most famous for? The Kiss, the Tree of Life, and his golden portraits.
Why did he use gold? His father was a gold engraver, and Byzantine mosaics inspired him to use real gold leaf.
What is Woman in Gold? His portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer, looted by the Nazis and later returned.
How did Klimt die? A stroke followed by the Spanish flu, in Vienna in 1918, aged 55.
Was Klimt part of a movement? Yes, he founded and led the Vienna Secession.
Was Klimt Jewish? No, he was raised Catholic. His famous sitter Adele Bloch Bauer was Jewish.
Where was Klimt from? Vienna, Austria, born in 1862.
Did Klimt paint cats? He loved cats and let them roam his studio freely.
Did Klimt marry? No. His lifelong companion was the designer Emilie Floge.
Was Klimt successful in his lifetime? Yes, he was famous and wealthy when he died.
The painter who dressed his lovers in gold
Klimt left almost no letters and gave almost no interviews. He said the work was the only thing worth looking at.
So we are left with the paintings: society women turned into Byzantine icons, draped in the gold his father once engraved. He made desire look like a religion, and Vienna has never quite recovered.