Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt led the Vienna Secession and painted The Kiss, among the most reproduced images in art. Born in Baumgarten near Vienna in 1862, the second of seven children of a struggling gold engraver, he trained at the School of Applied Arts and began as a decorative painter, working with his brother Ernst and Franz Matsch on theatre and museum interiors in a conventional historicist style. The team was successful and won the Golden Order of Merit in 1888. His father and brother both died in 1892, and his work changed afterwards. In 1897 he led a walkout of younger artists from the conservative Künstlerhaus to found the Vienna Secession, with the motto that to every age its art, to art its freedom. The Faculty Paintings commissioned for the University of Vienna ceiling — Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence — were delivered between 1900 and 1907 and rejected as pornographic and excessively pessimistic. Eighty-seven professors petitioned against them. He returned his fee, took the paintings back, and never accepted another public commission; all three were burned by retreating SS troops in 1945. His golden phase followed, using gold leaf learned from his father's trade and from Byzantine mosaics he saw at Ravenna. The Kiss of 1907-08 and the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer of 1907 belong to it. He lived with his mother and sisters all his life, never married, and had a long attachment to the fashion designer Emilie Flöge. He fathered at least fourteen children by various women. He supported the young Egon Schiele. He died of a stroke and influenza in February 1918.

• Lived: 1862 CE – 1918 CE
• Nationality: Austrian
• Roles: painter