Gustav Klimt Prints

About Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt was born in 1862 in Baumgarten, then a village outside Vienna, the son of a gold engraver. He trained at the Vienna School of Applied Arts from 1876 to 1883 and began as a conventional decorative painter, running the Company of Artists with his brother Ernst and Franz von Matsch; their staircase murals for the Burgtheater were finished in 1888. In 1897 he became a founding member and first president of the Vienna Secession, the breakaway group that brought Art Nouveau to Austria, and the controversy over his ceiling paintings for the University of Vienna pushed him away from public commissions toward portraits and allegories for private patrons. The Golden Phase that followed, with gold leaf laid into the paint, produced the Beethoven Frieze of 1902, the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I of 1907 and The Kiss of 1907 to 1908. He also painted square landscapes of the Attersee every summer. He died in Vienna in February 1918. Klimt's pictures combine a precisely drawn face or hand with large passages of flat pattern, which is why they survive reduction so well: the ornament reads as surface, and the gold reads as warmth rather than glare.