Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) was an Austrian painter and a founder of the Vienna Secession whose ornamental, gold-leaf canvases became among the most recognizable images of central European art around 1900. The second of seven children of a gold-engraver in Baumgarten near Vienna, he entered the Vienna School of Applied Arts at fourteen and trained in architectural painting alongside his brother Ernst and his friend Franz Matsch.

The trio worked together as the Kunstlercompagnie on murals for theaters and museums in Vienna, Karlsbad, and Bucharest during the 1880s. After his brother's death in 1892 his style shifted toward symbolist allegory and personal expression, breaking with academic decorum in the ceiling paintings he produced for the University of Vienna, which were rejected as obscene by the faculty and later destroyed in 1945.

In 1897 he led the secession from the established Kunstlerhaus, becoming the first president of the Vienna Secession and contributing to its journal Ver Sacrum. His Beethoven Frieze of 1902, painted for an exhibition honoring Max Klinger's Beethoven monument, remains in the Secession building. The works of his "golden phase," including Judith I (1901), Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), and The Kiss (1907-1908), combined naturalistic faces with flat, jewel-encrusted surfaces drawn from Byzantine mosaic.

He produced hundreds of preparatory drawings, painted Attersee landscapes during summer holidays, and mentored the young Egon Schiele. He died of pneumonia following a stroke in February 1918.

The given name Gustav is a Germanic form of an Old Swedish name combining Gautr, a Goth, with stafr, staff. He bore it through a remaking of Viennese visual culture.