The masters behind our paintings
Gustav Klimt – the painter who gilded Vienna
* 14 July 1862, Baumgarten near Vienna · † 6 February 1918, Vienna
A gold engraver's son who turned his city's art upside down: Gustav Klimt painted scandal and beauty, landscapes and icons – and kept many cats in his studio.
From gold engraver's son to modern star
-
Gold in the blood
Gustav Klimt is born in 1862, the second of seven children. His father is a gold engraver and money is tight. At 14 he wins a place at Vienna's School of Arts and Crafts – and learns the craft that will become his trademark: ornament, metal, shine.
-
The Artists' Company
With his brother Ernst and his friend Franz Matsch he founds a workshop for murals. The three paint ceilings in the new Burgtheater and spandrels in the staircase of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Young Klimt is in demand, praised – and still very conventional.
-
The break
In 1892 his father and his brother Ernst die within months of each other. Klimt withdraws and searches for a new path. In 1897 he co-founds the Vienna Secession and becomes its first president. Above the entrance of its building it still says: “To every age its art, to art its freedom”.
-
Scandal at the university
For the University of Vienna he is to paint the faculties of Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence. Instead of lofty allegories he shows floating, naked, vulnerable people. 87 professors protest. Klimt eventually buys his pictures back – in 1945 they burn in a castle in Lower Austria.
-
The golden phase
On a trip to Ravenna in 1903 he sees the Byzantine mosaics – gold, shine, surfaces without depth. Klimt lays gold leaf into his paintings, as his father had done on metal. “Adele Bloch-Bauer I” and “The Kiss” are created – two of the most famous pictures in Austria.
-
Emilie, the Attersee and the cats
Klimt never marries; his closest confidante is the fashion designer Emilie Flöge. With her he spends many summers at Lake Attersee and paints square landscapes, some framed through a pair of binoculars. In his last studio in Hietzing many cats keep him company.
-
The end
In January 1918 Klimt suffers a stroke, and pneumonia follows soon after. He dies in Vienna on 6 February 1918, aged 55. Unfinished paintings remain in his studio – stopped in the middle of painting.
His most famous paintings
Five pictures between Vienna, Dresden and New York – from the fighting spirit of the Secession to the gold that went around the world.
-
Pallas Athena The goddess of wisdom as a declaration of war – and gold is already flashing here. -
Portrait of Emilie Flöge His confidante in a blue dress – slender, proud and full of ornament. -
Beech Grove I Silence instead of gold: trunks like a curtain, painted in his typical square format. -
Adele Bloch-Bauer I The “Woman in Gold” – portrait, icon and in 2006 the most expensive painting ever sold. -
The Kiss Two lovers wrapped in gold on a meadow of flowers – Klimt's most famous picture.
The story behind the picture
The Woman in Gold
Sugar industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer commissions a portrait of his wife Adele. Klimt works on it for around three years, applying layer upon layer of gold and silver leaf and embedding Adele in a sea of eyes, spirals and ornaments. In 1907 the picture is finished.
After the “Anschluss” in 1938 the Nazis seize the painting. For decades it hangs in the Belvedere as the “Lady in Gold” – without the name of the Jewish family. Adele's niece Maria Altmann fights to get it back and wins in 2006 after a long legal battle.
That same year Ronald Lauder buys the picture for his Neue Galerie in New York – for a reported 135 million dollars, a record at the time. The story was filmed in 2015 as “Woman in Gold”. And now its gold shines for your pet too.
Your pet in gold
We keep Klimt's golden composition – ornaments, shine and pose – and put your pet in Adele's place. Fur, markings and expression come from your photo. The preview is free.
Images of the original paintings and photo: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.