Gustav Klimt was an Austrian painter, born on July 14, 1862, in Baumgarten, then a village outside Vienna, who died in Vienna in 1918. He founded the Vienna Secession, the movement of young artists who quit the city's established art society, and he covered his canvases in real gold leaf.
His best-known picture, The Kiss, shows a man in a golden cloak bending to kiss a woman at the edge of a flowered meadow, and it now sells on posters, mugs and phone cases. Around it he painted society portraits, allegories of love and death and square views of an Austrian lake.
He never explained any of it. "There is no self-portrait of me," he said, and he was "convinced that as a person I'm not particularly interesting." Anyone curious about him, he told people, should look attentively at his pictures.
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His own story began in Baumgarten, where Gustav was the second of seven children, and his father, an engraver also named Ernst, had come to Vienna from northern Bohemia at the age of eight.
In 1876, at fourteen, the boy entered the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, which trained decorators rather than easel painters. His younger brother, Ernst, followed him there, and with a classmate named Franz Matsch the three began to work as a team.
They called their studio the Artists' Company and painted ceilings and walls for theaters across the empire. Vienna was then lining its new Ringstrasse, the grand boulevard that circles the old center, with theaters, museums and a parliament, and every one of those buildings needed decorators.
The three painted the staircases of the Burgtheater, the court theater, from 1886, and in 1891 the stairwell of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the new museum of art history. In his twenties, Klimt had become the safe hire of the boom.
Two deaths in 1892
In 1892 that steady career broke. On July 13, his father died of a stroke. Before the year was out the family lost a second man, younger and without the slightest warning, and the painter who went back to work after that loss would no longer paint what clients expected.
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.