Search
    • media_content.tooltip.skipped

    Gustav Klimt, Famous Austrian Painter (1862 - 1918)

    As one of the leading figures of fin-de-siècle Vienna, Gustav Klimt created a body of works that made him what he is today: the most famous Austrian painter in the world.

    The painter Gustav Klimt was born on 14 July 1862 in Baumgarten, a part of today's 14th district in Vienna. He is considered the main figure of Austria’s Art Nouveau.

    From 1897 to 1905 Gustav Klimt was president of the Secession Vienna, of which he was also co-founder. His pictures, painted with unobtrusive colours full of symbolic power, are a combination of two-dimensional, mosaic-like elements and Art Nouveau ornaments. According to Klimt himself, who never painted self-portraits, he preferred to paint people - “especially women” - in mostly erotic forms. From his paintings, the viewer "should seek to recognize what I am and what I want.”

    Gustav Klimt died on 6 February 1918 in Vienna.

     


    Blick auf die Votivkirche und die Universität Wien
    media_content.tooltip.skipped

    The Early Years

    Gustav Klimt was born on 14th July 1862, into a lower-middle-class family in the Viennese suburb of Baumgarten as the second of seven children. His childhood and youth coincided with the zenith of the Gründerzeit, the period in nineteenth-century Germany and Austria marked by economic prosperity and large-scale construction.

    The great Ringstrasse project of the monumental building was just entering its final phase. Despite their difficult financial situation, the Klimts enjoyed harmonious family life, and the siblings remained close throughout their lifetimes. With much sacrifice on the part of the family, the talented young Gustav was sent to Vienna's School of Arts and Crafts (Kunstgewerbeschule), which later became the University of Applied Arts.

    He soon found himself in the midst of a group of artists who were working on the decoration of the new Ringstrasse buildings. At the beginning of the 1880s he, along with his brother Ernst and Franz Matsch, founded the Künstler-Compagnie, and over the next ten years, they received commissions to create murals and ceiling paintings in numerous buildings in Vienna and throughout the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire.

    With the death of Ernst Klimt in 1892, this "Company of Artists" disintegrated. But artistically Gustav Klimt had already outgrown the historicist style of interior decoration. In turn-of-the-century Vienna, where Sigmund Freud was publishing his epoch-making works, art too was searching for new directions. Under the influence of Symbolism, Klimt was searching for a new formal language that would enable him to depict the landscapes of the soul characterized by dark emotions and hopeful fantasy images.

    Secession
    media_content.tooltip.skipped

    The Vienna Secession

    In 1897, Klimt was catapulted into the public eye, becoming a founding member and the first president of the Vienna Secession, a group of artists striving for a renewal of art. The Secession, on the city's Karlsplatz, became the exhibition space for the new movement. It was the period of the most prominent scandals that the Austrian art world had ever seen, a series of events that culminated in 1900 with the so-called "faculty pictures" Klimt painted for the Great Hall of Vienna University.

    Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, painted for the Fourteenth Secession Exhibition in 1902, marked the beginning of a new creative period characterized by the dominance of ornamentation and the increased use of gold leaf: Klimt's "Golden Phase", which was to culminate in the painting The Kiss (1907/1908).

    Lake Attersee
    media_content.tooltip.skipped

    A Modern Pioneer

    It was in Emilie Flöge, who owned a fashion salon in Vienna, that Klimt found a lifelong companion, although he remained unmarried and fathered children with several other women. Flöge also introduced him to Attersee, the lake that inspired some of his most famous landscapes, and where he was to spend nearly every summer.

    After three decades of intensive work, numerous triumphs, and fierce hostility from his critics, Gustav Klimt died on 6th February 1918 after suffering a stroke. He was fifty-five years old. He is buried in Vienna's Hietzing Cemetery.

    Gustav Klimt was always reluctant to talk about himself, referring questioners instead to his works. Despite his success, he remained unsure of himself in social settings. He habitually wore a blue painter's smock, his hair was tousled, and he spoke the dialect of his humble origins.

    Despite receiving medals from Austrian emperors, Klimt was ignored by the aristocracy. He was the painter of the Haute bourgeoisie, which he depicted most prominently in his portraits of women, and he found numerous Jewish patrons who were open to the new trends in the arts. Klimt's life coincided with an epoch that the Austrian writer Hermann Broch called the "merry apocalypse". Klimt took this period of ambivalence and upheaval as a subject for artistic exploration and interpretation.

    The year of his death, 1918, represented a momentous turning point. That same year saw the deaths of a number of kindred spirits, such as Otto Wagner, Kolo Moser, and Egon Schiele, and it also marked the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. What followed was a time of economic hardship; memories of the fin de siècle faded. A further turning point was represented by the years of Nazi terror. Many of the Jewish families who were Klimt's patrons and friends fell victim to this terror or were forced into exile.

    Walk in Klimt's Footsteps

    These are the places to visit in Austria if you want to learn more about Klimt's life.

    • Vienna Secession

      The Vienna Secession - itself a masterpiece of Art Nouveau - displays the famous "Beethoven Frieze" at the very spot where it was first presented to the public.

      Learn more
          Secession
      media_content.tooltip.skipped
    • Klimt Villa in Vienna

      Gustav Klimt used this villa in the 13th Viennese district as a studio from 1911 until his death in 1918. It has been revitalized and re-opened to the public.

      Learn more
          North side of Klimt Villa
      media_content.tooltip.skipped
    Gustav Klimt, Der Kuss (Liebespaar)
    media_content.tooltip.skipped

    The Kiss in the Belvedere Museum in Vienna

    Klimt's most famous painting depicts a couple embracing in a field of flowers. The man is bent over the woman, and she - clinging tightly to him - awaits his kiss. The ornaments around the male figure are characterized by square and rectangular forms, while soft lines and floral patterns are dominant in the female. A golden halo surrounds the couple, but it ends at the bare feet of the female, whose toes are sharply bent and firmly dug into the flower-covered meadow. The couple seems to have shaken off this last remnant of earthly weight and has been transported into another infinite, almost sacred sphere, reminiscent of the gold background of Byzantine mosaics.

    When Klimt presented the painting to the public for the first time, in 1908, it was acquired - still unfinished - directly from the exhibition by the Austrian Gallery. This painting represents the centrepiece of the world's largest collection of works by Gustav Klimt, located in the Austrian Gallery in Vienna's Upper Belvedere Palace.

    Learn more
    media_content.tooltip.skipped
    media_content.tooltip.skipped