Gustav Klimt (14 July 1862 – 6 February 1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and a founding member of the Vienna Secession movement. His work helped define the Art Nouveau style in Europe. Klimt is known for his paintings, murals, sketches, and other objets d'art. Klimt's primary subject was the female body, and his works are marked by a frank eroticism. Amongst his figurative works, which include allegories and portraits, he painted landscapes. He is best known for The Kiss and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. Among the artists of the Vienna Secession, Klimt was the most influenced by Japanese art and its methods.
Early in his career, he was a successful painter of architectural decorations in a conventional manner. As he began to develop a more personal style, his work was the subject of controversy that culminated when the paintings he completed around 1900 for the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna were criticised as pornographic. He subsequently accepted no more public commissions, but achieved a new success with the paintings of his "golden phase", many of which include gold leaf. Klimt's work was an important influence on his younger peer Egon Schiele.
Klimt died in 1918, having suffered from a stroke and pneumonia. Since his death, Klimt's paintings have brought some of the highest prices recorded for individual works of art at auction.
Gustav Klimt was born in Baumgarten, near Vienna, in the Austrian Empire on 14 July 1862. He was the second of seven children: three boys and four girls. His mother, Anna Klimt (née Finster), had an unrealised ambition to be a musical performer. His father, Ernst Klimt the Elder, was a gold engraver from a peasant family in Bohemia. All three of their sons, including Klimt's younger brothers Ernst and Georg, displayed artistic talent early on. Klimt's siblings occasionally acted as models for his early works.
Klimt's father often struggled to find work, and Klimt lived in poverty while growing up. Between 1862 and 1884, the family had no fewer than five different addresses, forced to move in search of cheaper accommodation. The family's struggles worsened in 1874 when five-year-old Anna died after a long illness. Around the same time, Klara, the eldest child, became mentally disturbed and obsessed with religion. She never recovered, and their mother is believed to have suffered frequent, deep depressions.
Klimt received a basic education at an ordinary Bürgerschule, where his drawing ability was recognised as remarkable. At the age of fourteen, he was accepted into the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule, a school of applied arts and crafts, now the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where he studied architectural painting from 1876 until 1883. He studied under Ferdinand Laufberger and later Julius Victor Berger after Laufberger's death in 1881. Klimt revered Vienna's foremost history painter of the time, Hans Makart, and aspired to replicate his success. Klimt readily accepted the principles of conservative training; his early work may be classified as academic. His professional career began by painting interior murals and ceilings in large public buildings.
In 1877, Klimt's brother, Ernst, who would become an engraver like their father, also enrolled in the Kunstgewerbeschule. Klimt, Ernst, and their friend Franz von Matsch, whom Klimt had met during the entrance examination, soon began working together. By 1880, they had formed a team called the Künstlercompagnie ("Company of Artists") and secured numerous commissions. They also helped their teacher in painting murals in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Laufberger recommended them to Fellner & Helmer, a Viennese firm specialising in theatre construction, with whom they were involved in many projects including in Fiume, Reichenberg, Karlsbad, and Bucharest.
After leaving the Kunstgewerbeschule in 1883, Ernst, Klimt, and Matsch moved into a joint studio in Vienna to work together on various commissions. This work included ancestral portraits based on engravings for the Romanian royal palace of Peleș Castle. In 1886, the studio partnership worked on painting decoration in the Karlsbad municipal theatre, notably painting the vaulted ceiling and theatre curtain. The same year they also started work on the ceiling and spandrel murals for the two staircases of the Burgtheater in Vienna. It is for Klimt's contributions to these murals that, upon their completion in 1888, Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria awarded him the Gold Cross of Merit, the highest artistic honour available in Austria. He was also made an honorary member of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and the University of Vienna. Before the demolition of the Old Burgtheater, The Viennese City Council commissioned Klimt to paint a view of its interior. His painting Audience at the Old Burgtheater helped him obtain recognition among Vienna's high society, and he received public acclaim. In 1890, Klimt became the first recipient of the newly created Kaiserpreis award for this work.
In 1892, the Künstlercompagnie experienced continued success and moved into a larger studio in the Josefstadt district. However, later that year, Klimt's father died of a stroke, and his brother, Ernst, died from pericarditis after a heavy cold. Their deaths had a significant impact on Klimt, and he now assumed financial responsibility for both of their families. Grief may have impacted Klimt's artistic vision as he produced little work during the following few years. Following Ernst's death, the working relationship between Klimt and Matsch declined. Matsch moved out of their studio, and Klimt continued to occupy it alone. He would soon move towards a new personal style, characteristic of which is the inclusion of Nuda Veritas ("naked truth") as a symbolic figure in some of his works, including Ancient Greece and Egypt (1891), Pallas Athene (1898) and Nuda Veritas (1899).
Klimt met Austrian fashion designer Emilie Louise Flöge in the early 1890s, a sibling of his sister-in-law, Helene Flöge, who had become widowed after Ernst's death. Emilie became his lifelong companion and although their relationship was intimate, it likely remained platonic. Many scholars consider The Kiss (1907–08) to be an image of them as lovers. Five years earlier, Klimt painted a 1902 full-length portrait of her, Portrait of Emilie Flöge. He designed many costumes that she produced and modelled in his works. Klimt had many relationships with women and fathered at least fourteen children. After his death, the legal rights of four of these children were officially recognised.
Initially offered to Franz Matsch alone, but rejecting his sketches, in 1894, the Artistic Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Education commissioned Matsch and Klimt to decorate the Great Hall of the University of Vienna. Klimt was responsible for ten tympanum pictures and three of the five large ceiling paintings. These works represented the faculties of Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence and are known hence as the Faculty Paintings. Together with Matsch's Theology, they were designed to frame his central painting, The Triumph of Light Over Darkness. Not completed until the turn of the century, Klimt's paintings were criticised for their radical themes and material, and were called "pornographic". Klimt had transformed traditional allegory and symbolism into a new language that was more overtly sexual and hence more disturbing to some. The public outcry came from all quarters—political, aesthetic and religious. As a result, the paintings were not displayed on the ceiling of the Great Hall. This was to be the last public commission accepted by the artist. All three paintings were destroyed when retreating German forces burned Schloss Immendorf in May 1945, together with another ten paintings, including Schubert at the Piano (1899), Women Friends (1916/17), Wally (1916), and The Music (1897/1898).
In 1897, Klimt became one of the founding members and president of the Vienna Secession and of the group's periodical, Ver Sacrum ("Sacred Spring"). He remained with the Secession until 1908. The goals of the group were to provide exhibitions for unconventional young artists, to bring the works of the best foreign artists to Vienna, and to publish its own magazine to showcase the work of members. The group declared no manifesto and did not set out to encourage any particular style—Naturalists, Realists, and Symbolists all coexisted. The government supported their efforts and gave them a lease on public land to erect an exhibition hall. The group's symbol was Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of just causes, wisdom, and the arts—of whom Klimt painted his radical version in 1898.