Gustav Klimt is famous for his gold paintings, above all The Kiss and the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, made in Vienna in the early 1900s. Vienna first knew him as the leader of the Secession, a group of artists who walked out of the city's official art society in 1897, and as the painter at the center of a scandal over university ceilings.
The portrait of Adele, seized by the Nazis and returned to her family in 2006, gave him a second fame built on a court case.
Gold is the easy answer, and it is not wrong. It also arrives late in the story.
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The first Klimt that Vienna fought over was not gold at all. In 1894 the Austrian Ministry of Education hired him and a second painter, Franz Matsch, to fill the ceiling of the University of Vienna's festival hall with allegories of the faculties.
Klimt's share was three: Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence. In March 1900 the first of them went on view, and the professors who would sit beneath it rejected it.
The three paintings never reached the ceiling, and none of them survives.
The pictures that made Klimt notorious can no longer be seen, and the ones that made him famous are covered in metal. How one led to the other takes a fight with the state, a wealthy couple's portrait, and a family that waited more than sixty years to get it back.
What was the Vienna Secession?
A breakaway. In the 1890s the Association of Austrian Artists ran the exhibitions of Vienna, and its younger members found it too strict about what it accepted. On April 3, 1897, they held the first meeting of a new society, the Secession, and a month later cut their ties with the association for good. Gustav Klimt was one of its co-founders and its first president.
Their first exhibition opened in April 1898. Emperor Franz Joseph himself came to see the show on April 6, under a poster Klimt had drawn of the Greek hero Theseus, naked and ready for battle. That autumn the architect Joseph Maria Olbrich finished a hall built for the group, near Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts, and the second exhibition opened there, under the group's motto.
Der Zeit ihre Kunst. Der Kunst ihre Freiheit. "To every age its art, to every art its freedom."
The Secession gave Klimt a hall where his own circle decided what hung. In March 1900 he hung Philosophy there, and the professors saw it with everyone else.
What You'll Discover
Why professors turned on Philosophy.
What he painted once he refused the state.
Whose name the portrait lost.
Where the university paintings spent the war.