Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt, born on July 14, 1862, and dying on February 6, 1918, was an Austrian painter associated with symbolism. He helped start the Vienna Secession, a movement that shaped the Art Nouveau look across Europe. His output included paintings, murals, sketches, and decorative objects. The female body was his main focus, and his pieces often carry a direct erotic charge. Alongside allegories and portraits, he also created landscapes. His most famous works are *The Kiss* and *Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I*. Within the Vienna Secession, Klimt was the member most shaped by Japanese art and its techniques.

Early on, Klimt worked in a conventional style, successfully painting architectural decorations. As his personal approach emerged, controversy followed. Around 1900, his ceiling paintings for the University of Vienna’s Great Hall were condemned as pornographic. After that, he stopped taking public commissions. He found renewed success during his "golden phase," when many works incorporated gold leaf. His art strongly influenced the younger painter Egon Schiele. Klimt died in 1918 from a stroke and pneumonia. Since his death, his paintings have fetched some of the highest auction prices ever for individual artworks.

Klimt was born in Baumgarten, near Vienna, on July 14, 1862, the second of seven children. His mother, Anna, had wanted to be a musician but never achieved that goal. His father, Ernst the Elder, was a gold engraver from a Bohemian peasant family. All three sons—Gustav, Ernst, and another brother—showed artistic talent early. Klimt’s siblings sometimes modeled for his early pieces. The family struggled financially; his father often couldn’t find steady work. Between 1862 and 1884, they moved at least five times, seeking cheaper housing. Things worsened in 1874 when five-year-old Anna died after a long illness. Around then, the eldest child, Klara, became mentally ill and obsessed with religion, never recovering. Their mother likely suffered from frequent, deep depression.

Klimt attended a basic Bürgerschule, where his drawing stood out. At fourteen, he entered the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule (now the University of Applied Arts Vienna), studying architectural painting from 1876 to 1883. His teachers were Ferdinand Laufberger and, after Laufberger’s death in 1881, Julius Victor Berger. Klimt admired Vienna’s leading history painter, Hans Makart, and hoped to match his success. He accepted conservative training, so his early work is academic. He began his career painting interior murals and ceilings in large public buildings.

In 1877, his brother Ernst also enrolled at the Kunstgewerbeschule. Klimt, Ernst, and their friend Franz von Matsch (met during entrance exams) soon teamed up. By 1880, they formed the Künstlercompagnie (“Company of Artists”) and won many commissions. They helped their teacher paint murals at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. Laufberger recommended them to Fellner & Helmer, a firm specializing in theatre construction, leading to projects in Fiume, Reichenberg, Karlsbad, and Bucharest. After leaving school in 1883, the three shared a Vienna studio. Their work included ancestral portraits for the Romanian royal palace at Peleș Castle. In 1886, they painted the ceiling and curtain of the Karlsbad municipal theatre. That same year, they started ceiling and spandrel murals for the two staircases of Vienna’s Burgtheater. For his contributions to those murals, completed in 1888, Emperor Franz Joseph I awarded Klimt the Gold Cross of Merit, Austria’s highest artistic honor. He also became an honorary member of the universities of Munich and Vienna. Before the Old Burgtheater was demolished, the city council commissioned Klimt to paint its interior. His painting *Audience at the Old Burgtheater* brought him recognition among Vienna’s elite and public acclaim. In 1890, he was the first to receive a newly created award for that work.

In 1892, the Künstlercompagnie was still successful and moved to a larger studio in Josefstadt. But later that year, Klimt’s father died of a stroke, and his brother Ernst died of pericarditis after a bad cold. These losses deeply affected Klimt, who now had to support both families. Grief may have altered his artistic vision; he produced little in the following years. After Ernst’s death, Klimt’s working relationship with Matsch soured. Matsch left the studio, and Klimt worked alone. He soon developed a personal style, often including the symbolic figure *Nuda Veritas* (“naked truth”) in works such as *Ancient Greece and Egypt* (1891), *Pallas Athene* (1898), and *Nuda Veritas* (1899).