Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt was born on 14 July 1862 in Baumgarten, a suburb of Vienna, the second of seven children. His father Ernst was a goldsmith-engraver, his mother Anna an opera singer who never made a career of it. The father's trade was decisive: Klimt grew up surrounded by hammèred gold, and his whole body of work remembers it. At 14 he enrolled at the Kunstgewerbeschule, the Vienna school of décorative arts, with his brother Ernst.

His first period was academic and successful. With his brother and their friend Franz Matsch, he produced the décorations for the Burgtheater in Vienna (1888), then for the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Official recognition came in 1888 when Klimt received the Golden Order of Merit from the hand of Franz Joseph himself. But Ernst's death in 1892 changed him. He began to paint alone, and shifted into a different visual language.

In 1897, with Carl Moll, Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann, he co-founded the Vienna Secession and became its first président. The review Ver Sacrum appeared in March 1898. The Olbrich pavilion, crowned with its gilded laurel dome, opened the same year. Klimt showed the Beethoven Frieze there in 1902, a 34-meter mural cycle devoted to the Ninth Symphony.

The so-called Golden Period began with Pallas Athena (1898) and peaked between 1907 and 1908 with The Kiss, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, and Danae. Klimt incorporated actual gold and silver leaf directly onto the canvas and treated the dress as an autonomous pattern detached from the body. The Stoclet Frieze, commissioned in Brussels by the industrialist Adolphe Stoclet and finished in 1911, carried the formula into mosaic. Scandal surrounded several of these works, especially the University of Vienna faculty paintings, judged obscene and ultimately destroyed by the SS in 1945.

Klimt died of pneumonia on 6 February 1918, two months after a stroke. Adele Bloch-Bauer I, recovered after the war, now hangs at the Neue Galerie in New York. A Klimt print belongs on a light, sober wall in a thin oak or black frame: the gold does most of the work, the surroundings should let it speak.