Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) was an Austrian Symbolist painter and the founding president of the Vienna Secession, the movement that broke with academic tradition in 1897. The son of a gold engraver, he began as an architectural decorator before developing the shimmering, ornamental style that made him one of the defining artists of fin-de-siècle Vienna.

His celebrated “Golden Phase”—works such as Judith, The Kiss, and the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I—fused gold leaf, Byzantine mosaic, and Japanese influence into dense, decorative surfaces where figures dissolve into pattern. Sensual, symbolic, and unmistakably modern, his paintings drew scandal and acclaim in equal measure.

A relentless draughtsman, Klimt left thousands of studies of the female form rendered in spare, flowing line. He died in Vienna in 1918 with several works unfinished. More than a century later his art is in the public domain—and remains among the most recognizable in the world.