10 things to know about Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) began his artistic life far from the glittering portraits he’s now known for. Trained at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule, a school of applied arts and crafts, he worked as an architectural painter, creating murals and ceiling frescos for public buildings including the Burgtheater and the Kunsthistorisches Museum. His early works were traditional and highly accomplished — it was only later that he would develop his radical, ornamental style.

In 1897, Gustav Klimt and a group of like-minded artists broke away from the conservative Künstlerhaus to form the Vienna Secession. Their goal was to create space for modern, international art in Austria — art that embraced innovation over tradition. Klimt was elected the group’s first president and played a key role in launching its influential journal, Ver Sacrum. The Secession’s motto, ‘To every age its art, to every art its freedom’, still resonates today.

Klimt lived almost his entire life in and around Vienna, but a few key journeys had a lasting impact. A trip to Venice and Ravenna in 1903 proved particularly important. The golden mosaics of San Vitale and other Byzantine churches deeply influenced his use of gold and flattened space. This fusion of sacred art with sensual subject matter became one of his trademarks.

Klimt’s best-known works — The Kiss (1907–08) and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) among them — belong to what’s now called his ‘Golden Phase’. Inspired by the Byzantine mosaics he saw in Ravenna, he began incorporating gold leaf and intricate patterning into his paintings. The result was a series of luminous, dreamlike compositions that combined sensuality with surface brilliance. The works shocked some viewers at the time, but for Klimt, decoration was a pathway to deeper emotional and symbolic truth.

Klimt painted many of the leading women of fin-de-siècle Vienna. These were often not just socialites but intellectuals, patrons and artists in their own right — women like Adele Bloch-Bauer, Serena Lederer and Eugenia Primavesi. Rather than position them within traditional settings, Klimt surrounded his sitters with fields of ornament, gold and abstract form. He treated portraiture as both intimate encounter and artistic experiment.

Not all of Klimt’s work was met with admiration. In 1900, he was commissioned to paint three ceiling panels for the University of Vienna — Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence. The works, filled with naked, twisting bodies and dark symbolism, were widely criticised for being indecent and incomprehensible. The outcry was so great that Klimt returned the commission fee and refused to accept further public projects. The paintings were later destroyed in a fire in 1945, though photographs and sketches survive.

Klimt’s decorative vision extended beyond painting. For the Stoclet Palace in Brussels, he created shimmering mosaic panels — Expectation, The Tree of Life and Fulfilment (1905–11) — blending gold, pattern and symbolism in what he called ‘the ultimate stage of my development of ornament’. He also collaborated with the Wiener Werkstätte on everything from textiles to furniture, embracing the Art Nouveau ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk — a total work of art in which every detail was part of the design.

Klimt’s landscapes, painted mostly during summer holidays at Lake Attersee, represent a quieter, more contemplative side of his practice. Devoid of figures, these works focus on trees, lakes and gardens, rendered with pointillist precision and a tightly cropped perspective. While far less known than his portraits, Klimt’s landscapes are highly prized by collectors for their rich colour, surface rhythm and meditative quality.

During the Nazi era, many of Klimt’s paintings were seized from Jewish collectors. The most famous case involved the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, which was taken from the Bloch-Bauer family and later displayed in the Austrian state gallery. After a lengthy legal battle, the painting was returned to Adele’s niece, Maria Altmann, in 2006. It was subsequently sold for $135 million — then the highest price ever paid for a painting — in a sale brokered by Christie’s, and now hangs in the Neue Galerie in New York. The case, and its dramatisation in the film Woman in Gold, drew global attention to the issue of restitution.

Klimt died in 1918, aged just 55, after suffering a stroke and contracting pneumonia during the influenza pandemic. At the time, he was working on a number of unfinished paintings in a looser, more expressive style. His influence endured long after his death: he personally mentored younger Expressionists like Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, and remained a touchstone for Symbolist and Art Nouveau movements alike.