Gustav Klimt
An Austrian painter who wrapped the human form in gold and pattern, creating shimmering, psychologically charged icons of desire and decay.
1862–1918 (age 56)·Austrian symbolist painter·Birthday: July 14·The Gilded Age
Biography
Gustav Klimt stood at the fraught, gorgeous crossroads of nineteenth-century tradition and twentieth-century modernism in Vienna. As a founder and first president of the Vienna Secession, he led a rebellion against the city's artistic establishment, declaring a commitment to art for a new age. His early success with monumental murals gave way to his mature 'Golden Phase,' where he fused Byzantine mosaic, symbolic allegory, and a starkly modern eroticism. Figures in paintings like 'The Kiss' and the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer are consumed by intricate, decorative fields of gold leaf and pattern, their bodies both idealized and real, representing a world of luxury, longing, and psychological complexity. Though often controversial for their sensuality, his works became defining images of fin-de-siècle Vienna, capturing its glittering surface and the anxieties simmering beneath.
The Gilded Age
1860–1882
Born during or after the Civil War, they built industrial America — the railroads, the steel mills, the first skyscrapers. An era of massive wealth, massive inequality, and the belief that the future belonged to whoever could build it fastest.
Gustav was born in 1862, placing them squarely in The Gilded Age. The events that shaped this generation — world wars, depression, and rapid industrialization — shaped the world they entered and the choices available to them.
#1 When Gustav Was Born
The biggest hits of 1862
Gustav's Life & Times
The world at every milestone
1862Born
President: Abraham Lincoln
1867Started school
President: Andrew Johnson
1875Became a teenager
President: Ulysses S. Grant
1878Could drive
President: Rutherford B. Hayes
1880Could vote
Edison patents the incandescent light bulb
President: Rutherford B. Hayes
1883Turned 21
President: Chester A. Arthur
1892Turned 30
President: Benjamin Harrison
1902Turned 40
The eruption of Mount Pelee kills 30,000 in Martinique
President: Theodore Roosevelt
1912Turned 50
Titanic sinks on its maiden voyage
President: William Howard Taft
1918Died at 56
World War I ends; Spanish flu pandemic kills millions
President: Woodrow Wilson
Key Achievements
- Co-founded and served as the first president of the Vienna Secession, a radical group that broke from the conservative Austrian artistic establishment.
- Created iconic works like 'The Kiss' and the 'Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I' that define the Art Nouveau period's visual language.
- Pioneered the use of gold leaf and complex symbolic patterning in modern painting, most notably during his 'Golden Phase'.
- His 1907 'Beethoven Frieze' is a monumental allegorical work celebrating human yearning and artistic genius, created for the Secession building.
- Influenced a generation of artists, including his protégé Egon Schiele, through his expressive line and treatment of the figure.
Did You Know?
He often wore a long, simple smock while painting and reportedly had numerous affairs with his models.
Many of his most famous works were considered scandalous in his time; his University of Vienna ceiling paintings were criticized as 'pornographic'.
He was a cat lover and had several that roamed freely around his studio.
The location of his 1918 painting 'Portrait of a Lady' became a news story in 2019 when a gardener found it hidden in the wall of the gallery it was stolen from decades earlier.
He never married, but had a long-term relationship with fashion designer Emilie Flöge, who is the subject of several paintings.
““Truth is like fire; to tell the truth means to glow and burn.””
