Who Was Gustav Klimt and Why Is His Work So Important?

Klimt was born in the Viennese suburb of Baumgarten. Precociously gifted with artistic talent from a young age, he entered Vienna’s Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) when he was just 14.

Klimt’s father, Ernst, was a gold engraver; his mother, Anna, a lyric singer whose ambitions for a musical career were never fulfilled. The family spent most of Klimt’s childhood in poverty, moving frequently in search of cheaper lodgings. Klimt was the second of seven children, and his two younger brothers, Georg and Ernst Jr., also became artists, both enrolling in the same school as Klimt. Georg would become a metal sculptor, while Ernst Jr.—though he, like Klimt, trained as a painter—would become an engraver like his father.

In 1880, Klimt and Ernst Jr. joined with another student, Franz Matsch, to start the Company of Artists, which received commissions to create large-scale decorative murals for various public buildings. Among them were Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum; the Hermesvilla, a palace the emperor had built for his wife; and the Burgtheater, the capital’s principal performing venue. Klimt’s efforts earned him Austria’s highest artistic award, the Gold Cross of Merit, from Franz Josef in 1888.

Until the 1890s, Klimt worked in an academic style influenced by Austria’s premier history painter, Hans Makart (1840–1884). But in 1892, both Klimt’s father and Ernst Jr. died, dealing a devastating blow to the artist. Their passing marked the end of the Company of Artists and the beginning of a period in which Klimt pulled back from his work for several years before re-casting his art into the form most familiar to us today.

This approach began to creep in with two allegorical oils from 1895 on the themes of love and music, respectively. Both employed swathes of a gold-yellow hue, though Klimt didn’t yet employ the gilding that would characterize his iconic Golden Period about a decade later.

Gilding made an initial appearance in Pallas Athena (1898), an image of the ancient Greek goddess as an assertive female warrior wearing a helmet and a scaly breastplate enhanced with gold leaf. The intricacy of the latter evinced the emphasis on pattern that would become a hallmark of Klimt’s practice.

Pallas Athena also featured a miniature nude of a standing woman with outstretched arms and bushy, flaming-red hair. Held in Athena’s hand, this figure became a magnet of controversy when Klimt executed a nearly life-size version in 1899 presented as a full-frontal rendering that included pubic hair. Above the image Klimt inscribed a quote by the poet Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) that read, “If you can’t please everyone with your deeds and your art—please only a few. To please many is bad.” Titled Nuda Veritas (Naked Truth), the painting was immediately deemed pornographic by critics, a charge that was also leveled at three other allegorical figures by Klimt respectively titled Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence, created between 1900 and 1907 for the ceiling of the University of Vienna’s Great Hall. Populated by men and women baring all, these paintings were imbued with an overt sexuality that went well beyond their brief.

But the subject of Nuda Veritas was provocative in a larger sense due to the fact that instead of holding out her arms as she did in Pallas Athena, she held up a small mirror to the viewer—a gesture interpreted as a rebuke to Hapsburg society’s ossified tastes. Klimt made the point even more bluntly with a 1901–02 depiction of a smiling nude mooning the audience. He initially intended to call the painting To My Critics but was persuaded by friends to change the title to Goldfish after the large, shimmering carp occupying the composition’s middle ground.

Klimt’s newfound penchant for confrontational art was of a piece with his involvement in the Vienna Secession, which he started alongside designer Koloman Moser and architect Josef Hoffmann in 1897. Begun in opposition to the establishment Association of Austrian Artists, the Vienna Secession embraced the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, prefiguring the interdisciplinary movements (De Stijl, the Bauhaus, Russian Constructivism) that would help to shape 20th-century art.

A 1903 trip to the church of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, spurred Klimt’s auric effects to even greater heights after he saw the sixth-century Justinian and Theodora Mosaics. Comprising colored and gilded glass tiles, these encomiums to the eponymous eastern Roman emperor and his consort were occasioned by Justinian’s successful reconquest of Italy, which had fallen under barbarian rule following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire during the fifth century.

Along with various court and church officials, Justinian and Theodora are seen enveloped in gold as an assertion of his power over church and state, but also as an acknowledgment that heaven governed secular affairs. This use of gilt backdrops made a huge impression on Klimt, ushering in the full flourishing of his Golden Period. (Interestingly, although gold leaf is considered Klimt’s signature medium, it actually appeared in just a relative handful of works within his prodigious oeuvre.)

As previously noted, gold leaf enlivened Pallas Athena, which was also mounted in a gilt frame designed by Klimt’s brother Georg. Georg did likewise for Nuda Veritas and another piece, Judith (1901), Klimt’s highly eroticized take on the biblical heroine who seduced and then decapitated the Assyrian general Holofernes. Rather than depict the murder itself, Klimt conveyed the story in a portrait focusing on Judith’s sultry visage and flaunted breast.

The use of gold leaf, then, had become a feature of Klimt’s work by 1907, but three paintings created in and around that year represent the climax of his Golden Period: The Kiss, Hope II,and the aforementioned Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. In each, figures are isolated against a gilded backdrop, marking the fullest expression of what Klimt had gleaned from the Ravenna Mosaics.

One of the most recognizable works in art history, The Kiss is dominated by two lovers melded together as a proto-psychedelic shape. They’re pictured kneeling at the edge of a floral-carpeted precipice jutting into a gilded void. Hope II was the second of two paintings featuring pregnant women, though it took a more abstract approach than its predecessor by silhouetting its subject against a dappled field composed of gold and platinum leaf.

By far the most famous painting of the group is Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, due mainly to the dramatic story of plunder and restitution associated with it. The painting, a nearly full-length portrayal of its seated subject, was confiscated by the Nazis, who subsequently gave it to Vienna’s Belvedere Museum. After the war, the Belvedere kept the painting, citing Adele’s 1925 bequest of the piece to the museum even though it belonged to her husband.

He had willed it to his nephew and two nieces, one of whom, Maria Altmann, sued the Austrian government for the portrait’s return. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Altmann’s favor in 2006. The painting was returned and later sold to Ronald Lauder’s Neue Galerie in New York for a then-record $135 million.

Often called the Mona Lisa of Austria, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I does capture some of La Gioconda’s sublime presence, albeit with a jittery undercurrent. Adele’s skin is translucently pale, her face strangely elongated. Her neck is straitjacketed in a high, glittering choker made of diamonds. She has dark circles under her eyes and seems to clasp her hands fretfully. The overall sense of luxuriant, nervous energy is enhanced by the crazy quilt of symbols covering Adele’s off-the-shoulder gown.

Such patterns were a constant in Klimt’s work, but some of the hieroglyphs here have been interpreted as being vaginal in shape—evidence, some have said, that Adele was Klimt’s lover. (The same motif festooned the blue dress worn by Emilie Flöge, Klimt’s long-time mistress, in his 1902 portrait of her.) There’s no record of their relationship being anything other than platonic, though Klimt was certainly notorious for his womanizing: He is said to have fathered 14 children through numerous affairs conducted mainly with his models.

Adele may have been the inspiration for the woman in Pallas Athena and particularly for the one in Judith, who does strongly resemble Adele. Moreover, Adele was the only person Klimt painted twice, though Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II (1912), like Klimt’s portrayal of Elisabeth Lederer, was executed in pigments only.

In general, Klimt’s facture was a mix of tight modeling for anatomical features, with looser brush marks for background elements. Many of his landscapes, meanwhile, thrummed with short strokes and daubs of color that echo the work of Georges Seurat.

Whatever his achievements, Klimt’s paintings didn’t really reveal much about the artist personally. Despite him once saying that “what I am and what I want” could be found by looking at his pictures, they were stylized to the point of occluding his presence—save, perhaps, for his impressive libido. But while his work may have spoken little of his own life, it revealed the decadent world of privilege he glided through as it trembled on the brink of dissolution.