Vienna's gold-leaf rebel who left the official art world
Gustav Klimt began as a dependable painter of theatre ceilings and imperial staircases, decorated by the Emperor himself. Then his ceiling panels for the University of Vienna were denounced as pornographic, he swore off public commissions, and turned to gold leaf. The canvases that followed now fetch some of the highest auction prices ever paid.
Klimt was born in Baumgarten, just outside Vienna, in July 1862, the second of seven children of a Bohemian-born gold engraver, Ernst the Elder, and Anna, who had once hoped to perform music. Money was scarce: the family changed address at least five times before 1884 chasing cheaper rent, and in 1874 his five-year-old sister Anna died after a long illness. At fourteen he won a place at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule, studying architectural painting until 1883 and idolising the history painter Hans Makart.
With his brother Ernst and their friend Franz von Matsch he set up the Kunstlercompagnie by 1880. The trio painted portraits for Romania's Peles Castle, the ceiling and curtain of the Karlsbad theatre, and staircase murals for Vienna's Burgtheater, work that earned him the Gold Cross of Merit from Franz Joseph I in 1888 and, in 1890, the first Kaiserpreis. Then in 1892 his father died of a stroke and Ernst of pericarditis, leaving Klimt responsible for both households; for several years afterwards he painted little.
In 1894 the education ministry hired him and Matsch to paint the University of Vienna's Great Hall, and Klimt took on three of the big ceiling panels, Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence. Around 1900 critics condemned them as pornographic, and he never accepted state work again. In 1897 he had already become founding president of the Vienna Secession and its magazine Ver Sacrum, staying until 1908; his Nuda Veritas of 1899 and the Beethoven Frieze of 1902 date from those years.
His companion from the early 1890s was the fashion designer Emilie Floge, sister of Ernst's widow Helene; scholars often read The Kiss of 1907 to 1908 as the two of them. Summers with the Floge family at Attersee produced most of his landscapes, and the locals nicknamed him the forest demon. A stroke and pneumonia killed him in 1918.
Source: Gustav Klimt
