Artist

Gustav Klimt — Gold and Desire

1862, Baumgarten (Vienna) — 1918, Vienna

Viennese Secession (Art Nouveau, Symbolism)

Timeline

1862

Born in Baumgarten, near Vienna, son of a goldsmith

1876

Vienna School of Applied Arts

1888

Set designs for the Burgtheater (academic period)

1897

Founded and chaired the Vienna Secession

1902

Beethoven Frieze

1900–1907

Scandal over the faculty paintings

1907

The Kiss and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (Golden Period)

1907

Meets and mentors the young Egon Schiele

1918

Dies in Vienna on February 6

Two lovers embracing, wrapped in a huge golden cloak studded with patterns, at the edge of a field of flowers: Gustav Klimt’s *The Kiss* is one of the most famous and beloved images in the entire history of art. And this image says everything about its creator—the union of gold and desire, of the most sumptuous ornamentation and the most intense sensuality. A leading figure of the Vienna Secession and the undisputed master of Art Nouveau, Klimt created a unique pictorial universe in which women, love, life, and death are adorned with a thousand gold leaves.

Klimt was the painter of Vienna in 1900—that vibrant and sophisticated capital, at once sumptuous and decadent, where Freud pioneered psychoanalysis, where Mahler revolutionized music, and where a brilliant bourgeoisie patronized the arts. In this city of every pleasure and every anxiety, Klimt was the painter of elegance, sensuality, and desire. His portraits of high-society women, his erotic allegories, and his bodies entwined in gold caused as much scandal as they did fascination. He embodied the luxury and audacity of a civilization at its peak, just before it collapsed into World War I.

Gold is his signature. The son of a goldsmith, inspired by Byzantine mosaics, Klimt made gold leaf the central element of his art. During his “golden period,” he covered his canvases in gold and silver, transforming his figures into sumptuous icons, halfway between a painting and a jewel. This gold is not merely ornamental: it imbues his subjects with a sacred, precious, and eternal dimension. The beloved woman becomes an idol, the embrace becomes a ritual, desire becomes sacred. It is this unique fusion of the carnal and the spiritual, of eroticism and the sacred, that creates the magic of his art.

Klimt was also a bridge-builder. As a leader of the Secession, he opened the doors to modernity in Vienna. As a mentor to the young Egon Schiele, he passed the torch to the Expressionist generation. Between the tradition from which he emerged and the modernity he heralded, between ornament and anguish, between gold and desire, Klimt occupies a unique place in art history—that of an icon-maker, whose images continue to fascinate the entire world.

This article traces the career of this master of gold and desire—the goldsmith’s son, his early academic years, his break with the Secession, the scandal surrounding his college paintings, his golden age and its splendor, his celebration of women, his lesser-known landscapes, his mentorship of Schiele, and the immense legacy of an artist who became a global icon.

Vienna, 1862 — the goldsmith’s son

Gustav Klimt was born on July 14, 1862, in Baumgarten, a suburb of Vienna, into a modest family. His father, Ernst Klimt, was a goldsmith and gold engraver—a crucial detail, as it was undoubtedly this paternal legacy that gave rise to the love of gold that would characterize Gustav’s work. The second of seven children, the young Klimt grew up in a craft-oriented environment where precious metals were worked and where the brilliance and value of gold were well understood.

The family faced financial difficulties, but young Gustav’s talent for drawing was quickly recognized. In 1876, at the age of fourteen, he enrolled at the Vienna School of Applied Arts (Kunstgewerbeschule), where he received a solid technical education. He studied there until 1883, learning drawing, painting, and decorative techniques. Unlike many artists who trained at the Academy of Fine Arts, Klimt graduated from a school of applied arts—which partly explains his enduring interest in ornamentation, decoration, and the union of art and craftsmanship.

From his early training years, Klimt showed exceptional talent, particularly for mural and decorative painting. Together with his brother Ernst, also an artist, and their friend Franz Matsch, he formed a team that quickly began receiving commissions. These three talented young men founded an “Artists’ Company” and specialized in decorating large public and private buildings. The young Klimt thus earned a living from an early age by creating decorations in the academic style that was prevalent at the time.

This dual background—his training in the applied arts and the legacy of his father’s goldsmithing—is essential to understanding Klimt’s art. It explains his penchant for ornamentation, for precious materials, and for the fusion of painting and decoration. It already foreshadows the dual role of goldsmith-painter that would define the originality of his “golden period,” during which he would handle gold leaf like a jeweler. The goldsmith’s son would go on to become the great goldsmith of painting.

Early Academic Career

Before becoming the revolutionary figure of the Secession, Klimt was, for more than a decade, a successful decorative painter, working in the most orthodox academic style. This early career, though often overlooked, sheds light on the break that would follow.

Together with his brother and Franz Matsch, Klimt received prestigious commissions to decorate major buildings in Vienna and throughout the Empire. Notably, the trio created the decorations for the staircase of the Burgtheater, the grand court theater (1888), and, most notably, the paintings for the staircase of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna’s Museum of Art History (1890–1891). These works, executed in an impeccably historicist and academic style, earned the young artists recognition and honors. Klimt even received an imperial distinction.

These early works show Klimt to be a master of academic technique, capable of rivaling the most renowned court painters. But they also reveal, even at this early stage, a distinctive sensibility: a keen sense of elegance, line, and the female form, as well as a tendency toward stylization. In the allegorical figures and subjects he painted for these sets, we can already glimpse the Klimt of the future—the artist who would make women and ornamentation the heart of his art.

But Klimt could not be content with this academic success for long. Around the mid-1890s, a shift began to take place. The death of his brother Ernst in 1892 affected him deeply. His style became more personal, imbued with symbolism, and broke with convention. Klimt yearned for a new freedom, for an art that was more personal, more modern, and more daring. This aspiration would lead him to break with the artistic establishment and spearhead a revolution: the Vienna Secession.

The Vienna Secession

In 1897, Gustav Klimt took the decisive step in his career: together with a group of artists, he broke away from Vienna’s official art establishment and founded the Vienna Secession, becoming its first president. This was one of the defining moments in the history of modern art in Austria.

The Secession—the word itself implies a break, a separation—brought together artists eager to break free from the conservatism of official Viennese art, embodied by the venerable Association of Austrian Artists. These young artists wanted to bring to Vienna the artistic modernity that was bubbling up across the rest of Europe: Art Nouveau, Symbolism, and decorative experiments. They wanted art that was free, modern, and in tune with its time. Their motto, inscribed on the pediment of their palace, summed up their ambition: to each era its art; to art, its freedom.

The Secession established an iconic venue: the Secession Building, a revolutionary structure crowned by a dome of gilded foliage, nicknamed “the golden cabbage” by the Viennese. Exhibitions were held there that introduced Vienna to the great modern European artists. The movement had a comprehensive and ambitious vision: not only to revitalize painting, but also to break down the barriers between the fine arts and the applied arts, to infuse everyday life with beauty, and to unite all the arts into a single, comprehensive work. This ideal would give rise, a few years later, to the Vienna Workshops (Wiener Werkstätte), which applied modern art to furniture, jewelry, and objects.

Klimt was the driving force behind this movement. As president, as an artist, and as a leading figure, he embodied the Secession and Viennese modernism. It was within this context that he developed his new, symbolist, and ornamental style and created major works such as the Beethoven Frieze (1902), a vast mural conceived as a hymn to music and art. The Secession established Klimt as the recognized leader of the Viennese avant-garde—and placed him at the center of the artistic debates and scandals of his time.

The College Art Scandal

At the turn of the century, Klimt experienced the most sensational scandal of his career—an ordeal that left a deep mark on him and turned him away from official art for good. It was the “university paintings” affair.

As early as the 1890s, the University of Vienna had commissioned Klimt to create large allegorical paintings to adorn the ceiling of its grand hall, depicting the faculties of knowledge: Philosophy, Medicine, and Law. When Klimt presented these works between 1900 and 1907, there was an outcry. Instead of the noble and reassuring allegories that had been expected—celebrating the triumph of reason and science—Klimt had painted dark, disturbing, and charged with eroticism and anguish: entwined naked bodies, suffering figures, images of life and death, desire and decay.

The scandal was immense. Conservative critics and the press cried out that the work was obscene, pornographic, and an affront to scholarship and morality. Professors protested. The affair took on a public and political dimension. Klimt, hurt by this lack of understanding and hostility, made a radical decision: he bought back his works, returned the money from the commission, and permanently renounced official public commissions. He no longer wanted to be dependent on the tastes of the government and conservative critics.

This episode proved decisive. It freed Klimt from all official constraints and propelled him toward an art that was even more personal, freer, and bolder. From then on, he would work for private patrons—Vienna’s brilliant, enlightened bourgeoisie, largely Jewish, who supported the modern arts—and follow his own inspiration alone. It was in the years following this scandal that Klimt created his most famous masterpieces, those of his Golden Period. The rejection of official art had paved the way for his most personal genius. (A final tragedy struck these academic paintings: stored in a castle, they were destroyed by fire in 1945, in the final days of the war. We now know them only through photographs.)

The Golden Age

It was during the first decade of the 20th century that Klimt reached the pinnacle of his art, during what is known as his “Golden Period”—those years when he covered his canvases with gold leaf, creating the most famous and fascinating works of his career. This was the essence of his genius and the source of his fame.

In Klimt’s work, gold has several sources. First, there is the legacy of his father, a goldsmith, who had introduced the young Gustav to working with precious metals. Then came a decisive revelation: during his travels in Italy, Klimt discovered the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna, particularly those in the Basilica of San Vitale, with their dazzling gold backgrounds and their solemn, sumptuous figures. This vision deeply moved him and inspired him to use gold in his own works. Byzantine gold, a symbol of the divine and eternity, became the central element of his art.

In his works from the Golden Period, Klimt applied real gold and silver leaf to his canvases, much like an illuminator or a goldsmith. He created sumptuous, shimmering surfaces where figures stand out against golden backgrounds, wrapped in cloaks adorned with geometric patterns, spirals, circles, and checkerboard designs. The painting becomes a jewel; the canvas becomes an icon. The contrast between the faces and hands—rendered with delicate naturalism—and the gilded ornamentation surrounding them creates a fascinating tension between living flesh and precious decoration. It is from this period that his absolute masterpieces date: *The Kiss* (1907–1908), *Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I* (1907), *Judith*, and *Danaë*.

For Klimt, gold is not merely a decorative luxury: it has a profound symbolic value. It imbues his subjects with a sacred, precious, and timeless quality. The beloved woman, the lovers’ embrace, the desired body—all are elevated by gold to the status of revered icons. Gold transforms the carnal into the spiritual, desire into the sacred, and the moment into eternity. It is this alchemy—the fusion of the most sensual eroticism and the most sumptuous sacredness—that gives Klimt’s gilded works their unique power of fascination. By adorning desire with all the splendor of gold, Klimt turns it into a celebration that is both carnal and transcendent.

Desire and Women

If gold is Klimt’s medium, women are his subject and his soul. Almost all of his work is a celebration of women, desire, and Eros. This is the central theme that runs through his paintings, from his early days until his death.

Klimt was, above all, a painter of women. He explored every aspect of the female form: the elegant socialite in his commissioned portraits, the lover in an embrace, the seductress, the femme fatale, the allegory of life or death, the mother, the virgin, and the courtesan. His portraits of women from Viennese high society—Adele Bloch-Bauer, Fritza Riedler, Serena Lederer, Sonja Knips—rank among the most beautiful in the history of the genre: in them, he combines psychological realism in the faces with decorative stylization taken to the extreme, transforming each subject into a modern, precious, and enigmatic icon.

Desire and sensuality permeate his entire body of work. Klimt celebrates the female body, love, and the embrace with a boldness that often scandalized his contemporaries. His depictions of femmes fatales—Judith holding Holofernes’ head in a troubled ecstasy, Salome, the entwined virgins—express a powerful, dangerous, and fascinating sexuality. His countless erotic drawings, long kept hidden, reveal his unflinching exploration of female desire and pleasure. Klimt makes Eros the secret driving force of life and art, in the spirit of 1900s Vienna, where Freud was simultaneously exploring the impulses of the unconscious.

One woman held a special place in Klimt’s life: Emilie Flöge, a fashion designer and businesswoman who was his partner and muse for nearly thirty years, until his death. Although they never married and Klimt had numerous other affairs, Emilie was the love of his life, the one who mattered most. It was her name that he is said to have uttered on his deathbed. People have often sought to recognize her features in certain figures in his paintings, particularly in the woman in *The Kiss*. Emilie embodies the deep connection between Klimt’s life and work, between the man and the painter of desire.

Landscapes: The Other Klimt

Alongside the gilded figures and portraits of women that brought him fame, Klimt developed a lesser-known but equally remarkable aspect of his work: landscape painting. These paintings, long overlooked, reveal a different side of Klimt—one that is more intimate and contemplative.

Klimt became interested in landscape painting in 1898 and returned to the subject every summer during his stays on the shores of Lake Attersee, in the Austrian Lake District, where he spent his vacations with Emilie Flöge and her family. Far from the social hustle and bustle of Vienna, he painted nature there: birch forests, orchards, flower-filled gardens, the lake’s shores, and village facades. These landscapes, often in square format, make up a significant portion of his body of work.

The style of these landscapes differs from that of his figures. In them, Klimt often employs an asymmetrical composition, a close-up framing that omits the sky and the horizon, and an almost abstract vision of nature reduced to a tapestry of colors and shapes. His brushwork is fragmented and vibrant, consisting of small, juxtaposed patches reminiscent of the experiments of the French Impressionists and Pointillists. Klimt transforms nature into a shimmering decorative surface, a profusion of colors and patterns, where trees, flowers, and foliage become an ornamental fabric. One of these works, *Roses Under the Trees*, is housed at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris—the only Klimt painting in French collections.

These landscapes reveal Klimt’s sensitivity to nature and his affinity with the developments in modern European painting. They show an artist attentive to light, color, and texture—one capable of transforming an orchard or a forest into a pure decorative symphony. Far removed from the gold and desire of his major figures, these paintings reveal a more peaceful, more meditative Klimt, lost in the contemplation of nature. They serve as a valuable counterpoint to his work as a painter of women and attest to the breadth of his genius.

Schiele’s Teacher

In the final years of his life, Klimt played a decisive role as a guide and mentor to the younger generation of Viennese artists—foremost among them Egon Schiele, who would go on to become the leading figure in Austrian art after Klimt.

In 1907, the seventeen-year-old Schiele met Klimt, who was then at the height of his fame. Klimt, with remarkable generosity, took the young man under his wing. He recognized his talent, encouraged him, bought his drawings, gave him some of his own in exchange, introduced him to patrons and dealers, and brought him into the circles of the Secession and the Viennese Ateliers. For Schiele, this mentorship was decisive: Klimt opened the doors to Vienna’s art world for him and reinforced his sense of vocation.

Klimt’s influence on Schiele’s early works is evident: the young painter initially imitated his master’s ornamental and sensual style. But Schiele would soon break away from it radically, inventing an art of anguish and the raw, exposed body—the polar opposite of Klimt’s gold and sublimated sensuality. The contrast between the master and the student is striking: where Klimt adorns and sublimates women and desire in gold, Schiele flays and strips the body bare in anguish. One celebrates, the other torments; one embellishes, the other lays bare. Together, they embody the two sides of Vienna in 1900—splendor and anguish, ornament and the cry.

This master-disciple relationship forever united the two greatest artists of turn-of-the-century Vienna. And fate bound them together even in death: both died in 1918, a few months apart, struck down by the same Spanish flu epidemic. Klimt was the first to go, in February; Schiele followed in October. Klimt’s death made Schiele the new leader of the Viennese art scene—but only for a few months. In 1918, an entire era of art—that of the dazzling Vienna of 1900—came to an end with the passing of its two greatest masters.

His Final Years and Death

In Klimt’s final years, his art evolved, while his fame—which had once been disputed—was once again solidified. But death abruptly cut short this period of artistic maturity.

After 1910, Klimt gradually moved away from gold. His style evolved: he gradually abandoned gold backgrounds in favor of brighter, more varied colors, applied in nuanced brushstrokes. This evolution reflects the influence of the modern French painters Klimt was discovering—Van Gogh, Matisse, and the Fauvists, whose bold use of color left a lasting impression on him. His late portraits and compositions are filled with vibrant colors and motifs borrowed from folk art and non-European traditions. Gold gives way to color.

This later period also reflects a more serious, and at times tragic, trend. Klimt explores themes such as motherhood, the stages of life, and death. His grand allegories of life and death, his images of mothers and children, take on a meditative and somber tone that already foreshadows the Expressionism of the next generation. The artist of splendor and desire grows more somber and anxious as he ages and Europe descends into war.

Klimt continued to work and exhibit, honored and recognized, until the very end. His reputation, which had been called into question during the scandal over the university paintings, had been restored; he once again enjoyed great prestige, both in Austria and abroad. But in January 1918, he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. Weakened, he contracted pneumonia, which was exacerbated by the Spanish flu epidemic that was then ravaging Europe. He died in Vienna on February 6, 1918, at the age of fifty-five, leaving several unfinished works in his studio.

His death marked the end of an era. With Klimt’s passing went the master of the Secession, the iconic painter of turn-of-the-century Vienna, the artist who had embodied the splendor and audacity of a civilization at its zenith. A few months later, the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself collapsed, swept away by defeat. Klimt’s Golden Vienna was now a thing of the past.

The Legacy — A Global Icon

More than a century after his death, Gustav Klimt has become one of the most famous and beloved artists in the world. His legacy, long underappreciated, is now enjoying resplendent fame.

After his death, Klimt’s work was neglected for a time, overshadowed by the avant-garde movements of the 20th century, which considered his art too decorative and too tied to a bygone era. But beginning in the final decades of the century, his reputation experienced a spectacular revival. *The Kiss* became one of the most reproduced and popular images in the entire history of art, adorning countless posters, objects, and merchandise. Klimt became a global cultural icon, synonymous with elegance, sensuality, and refinement.

This fame was accompanied by recognition in the art market, where Klimt’s works reached new heights. The most sensational story was that of *Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I*, the “Golden Lady.” Looted by the Nazis during World War II and held by the Austrian government after the war, the painting was the subject of a lengthy legal battle led by Maria Altmann, heir to the Bloch-Bauer family, to secure its return. In 2006, following Maria Altmann’s victory, the painting sold for $135 million—one of the highest prices ever paid for a work of art. This story, brought to the screen in the film *The Woman in the Painting*, introduced Klimt to an even wider audience.

Klimt’s legacy, however, extends far beyond the popularity of a few images. He played a major historical role: as the leader of the Secession, he introduced modernity to Vienna and embodied Art Nouveau. He revitalized the art of portraiture and allegory. He boldly explored the themes of desire, womanhood, life, and death. And he was the master and mentor who, by supporting Schiele and Kokoschka, paved the way for the advent of Expressionism. From tradition to modernity, from Symbolism to Expressionism, Klimt occupies a pivotal place in art history. The painter of gold and desire remains, forever, one of the most fascinating creators of icons that art has ever known.

How to View His Works

Klimt’s works are mainly housed in Vienna, but some of his major works are located elsewhere in the world.

At the Belvedere, in Vienna

The Belvedere Museum in Vienna houses the world’s largest collection of Klimt’s works, with twenty-four paintings, including his absolute masterpiece, *The Kiss* (1907–1908), as well as *Judith I* (1901) and other major works. It is the essential, must-see destination for discovering Klimt’s art.

Elsewhere in Vienna

The Leopold Museum houses works and drawings by Klimt, alongside its Schiele collection. The Wien Museum, the Leopold Museum, and the Secession Building (which houses the Beethoven Frieze) round out the Viennese tour. The entire city honors the memory of its greatest painter.

Around the World

The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (“The Woman in Gold”) is on display at the Neue Galerie in New York. Other works are scattered among major international museums. In France, the Musée d’Orsay houses a landscape, *Rosiers sous les arbres* —the only painting by Klimt in French public collections.