Gustav Klimt: The Life Story Behind the Golden Painter
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There is a moment in front of The Kiss when most people stop trying to explain the painting and simply stand still. Two lovers kneel on a flowery bank, wrapped in a single golden cloak, and the gold seems to glow from inside the canvas rather than sitting on its surface. Gustav Klimt painted that glow again and again, in portraits of wealthy Viennese women, in allegories of love and death, and in landscapes that shimmer like jewellery. He made gold, a material that belongs to churches and palaces, feel intimate, as if it were the colour of skin, of hair, of a private moment.
Klimt did not start as a rebel. He started as a skilled young decorator who painted ceilings for theatres and public buildings in Vienna, doing exactly what his clients asked for. He learned his trade the old way, in a family of craftsmen, and he could paint a classical figure as well as anyone in the city. The change came slowly, and it came from inside: he began to want more than decoration, more than a pretty ceiling, and he began to paint what interested him, even when it shocked the people who paid for art. That slow turn, from obedient craftsman to the most argued-about painter in Austria, is the heart of his story.
Vienna at the turn of the century was a city of music, coffee houses, and grand buildings, and it was also a city full of tension, where old rules were breaking and new ideas were fighting for air. Klimt lived in the middle of that tension. He founded a new artists’ group, he painted pictures that were called obscene, he lost public commissions, and he kept working in his own studio, surrounded by cats, by models, and by the gold leaf that became his signature. He died in 1918, just as the empire he had painted for was falling apart, and his work has only grown brighter since.
A Goldsmith’s Son in Baumgarten
Gustav Klimt was born on 14 July 1862 in Baumgarten, then a village near Vienna, in what is now part of the city. His father, Ernst Klimt, was a gold engraver, a craftsman who worked with metal and with fine detail, and his mother, Anna, had once dreamed of being a singer. The family was not rich, and there were seven children to feed. Young Gustav grew up in a house where making things with the hands was normal work, and where beauty was not an abstract idea but something you could hold, polish, and sell. That early closeness to gold and to craft stayed with him for the rest of his life.
Money was short, and the family moved into Vienna itself when Gustav was still a boy. He went to school, and he showed a clear talent for drawing. At fourteen he won a place at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, the Kunstgewerbeschule, where he studied drawing and decorative painting. He was a serious student, not a wild one, and he learned to copy old masters, to draw the human body, and to design patterns that could be used on walls, ceilings, and furniture. His brother Ernst, two years younger, followed him into the same school, and the two brothers would later work together as painters and decorators.
The school taught Klimt that art could be useful, that a painting could belong on a ceiling or a wall and still be art. That idea mattered, because Vienna in the 1880s was building theatres, museums, and grand houses, and all of them needed decoration. Klimt did not look down on that work. He took it seriously, and he became very good at it. He learned to work on a large scale, to manage assistants, and to finish a job on time, skills that many painters who only ever worked alone never learned. He was, in short, a professional before he was a rebel.
His father died in 1892, and his brother Ernst died the same year, a double blow that left Gustav as the head of the family and the main earner. He took on the responsibility without complaint, and he kept the family going through his commissions. Those deaths also changed him. He became more private, more focused on his own work, and less willing to waste time on jobs that did not interest him. The young decorator who had done what he was told was beginning to ask himself what he actually wanted to paint.
Painting Ceilings for Imperial Vienna
In the 1880s Klimt, his brother Ernst, and their friend Franz Matsch formed a group called the Company of Artists, and they won commissions to decorate public buildings across the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They painted ceilings and murals for theatres in Vienna, in Reichenberg, in Fiume, and in other cities, working in a grand historical style that pleased their clients. The work was classical, full of allegorical figures, soft colours, and careful drawing, and it made the young Klimt a respected name in Vienna. He won a Golden Order of Merit from the emperor for his work on the Burgtheater, and for a time he seemed set on a safe, successful path.
The most important commission of this period was the decoration of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where Klimt painted figures and scenes on the staircases and ceilings. The work showed his skill, and it showed that he could handle a large public job. But it also showed the limits of that kind of painting. The pictures had to please a committee, they had to fit a building, and they had to avoid offending anyone. Klimt was good at that game, but he was growing tired of it. He wanted to paint pictures that came from his own mind, not from a brief written by someone else.
In 1894 the University of Vienna asked Klimt to paint three large pictures for the ceiling of its Great Hall, on the themes of Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence. The commission should have been the crowning achievement of his public career, and it became the scandal that ended it. Klimt painted the pictures in his own way, with naked bodies, swirling figures, and a sense of mystery that had nothing to do with the clear, noble allegories the university expected. Philosophy showed a mass of floating bodies, Medicine showed a dark, powerful figure of death and life, and Jurisprudence showed a man caught in a web of punishment.
The university professors were outraged, and eighty-seven members of the faculty signed a petition against the pictures. Newspapers called them obscene, and the public argued about them for years. Klimt, who had expected praise, found himself attacked in print and in person. He bought back the pictures with help from a supporter, and they were later destroyed by fire during the Second World War, so we know them now only from photographs and sketches. The scandal hurt him, but it also freed him. He would never again take a public commission that asked him to paint against his own nature.
The Secession and a Break with the Old Guard
In 1897 Klimt helped to found the Vienna Secession, a group of artists who broke away from the conservative artists’ association that had controlled exhibitions in the city. The Secession built its own exhibition hall, a white building with a golden dome that still stands in Vienna, and it showed work by Austrian artists and by foreign artists like the French Impressionists and the Scottish designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The motto over the door read, in German, that to every age its art, and to art its freedom, and Klimt took those words seriously.
As the first president of the Secession, Klimt was the public face of the new movement. He organised exhibitions, he wrote for the group’s magazine, and he defended the idea that art should be free to show modern life, modern feeling, and the human body as it really is. The Secession was not only about painting. It was about design, about furniture, about posters, and about the idea that a whole life could be made beautiful, from a chair to a dress. That idea, which later became known as the total work of art, shaped Vienna for a generation, and Klimt was at its centre.
The Secession years were also the years when Klimt’s personal style became clear. He began to paint portraits of wealthy Jewish women in Vienna, women like Adele Bloch-Bauer, who became his most famous sitter. He painted them in gold, surrounded by patterns, and he showed them as strong, thoughtful, and beautiful, not as pretty ornaments. The portraits were expensive, and they were controversial, because they showed women as people with inner lives, and because they used gold in a way that felt both ancient and modern. The women who sat for him trusted him, and their families paid him well, and the portraits became the foundation of his income and his fame.
Klimt’s studio in Vienna became a world of its own. He worked in a long smock, he kept cats, and he painted surrounded by models, fabrics, and gold leaf. He rarely went out in the evening, and he preferred to work in the morning, in silence, with the light coming through the windows. He was not a social butterfly, and he did not enjoy the fame that came with the portraits. He enjoyed the work, and he enjoyed the freedom to paint what he wanted, after years of painting what others wanted. The Secession had given him that freedom, and he used it.
The Kiss and the Golden Years
Between 1907 and 1908 Klimt painted The Kiss, the picture that would become his most loved work. It shows a man and a woman kneeling on a small patch of flowers, wrapped in a golden cloak that covers them both. The man bends to kiss the woman’s cheek, and the woman closes her eyes and holds his face with one hand. The gold is not a background. It is the clothing, the ground, and the light, all at once. The picture is about love, but it is also about the moment when two people become one shape, and Klimt painted that moment with a tenderness that is rare in art.
The Kiss was bought by the Austrian state before it was even finished, and it was shown at an exhibition in Vienna in 1908, where it was praised as a masterpiece. It was the high point of Klimt’s golden period, a time when he used gold leaf, silver, and rich pattern in almost every picture. Adele Bloch-Bauer I, painted in 1907, is the other great picture of this period, a portrait of a woman in a golden dress, sitting on a golden chair, with a face that is calm and distant. The portrait is both a likeness and a piece of jewellery, and it has become one of the most famous portraits in the world.
These golden pictures were not easy to make. Gold leaf is fragile, it tears, and it must be laid on a surface that has been prepared with care. Klimt learned the technique from his father’s work as a gold engraver, and he used it with a craftsman’s patience. He also used patterns from many sources, from Japanese prints, from Byzantine mosaics, from Egyptian art, and from the folk art of central Europe. The result was a style that looked both old and new, as if a Byzantine mosaic had been painted by a modern man who loved the women of Vienna. That mix is why the pictures still feel fresh, more than a century later.
The golden years were also years of travel. Klimt went to Venice, to Ravenna, where he saw the Byzantine mosaics in the church of San Vitale, and the gold of those mosaics stayed in his mind. He went to Paris, to London, and to other cities, and he looked at art wherever he went. He was not a man who stayed at home and repeated himself. He looked, he learned, and he brought what he had seen back to his studio in Vienna. The gold in his pictures is not only a material. It is a memory of Ravenna, of a church, of a city, and of a man who never stopped looking.
Landscapes, Loss, and the Last Portraits
While the portraits made him famous, Klimt also painted landscapes, and he painted them for himself. Every summer he went to the Attersee, a lake in Upper Austria, and he painted the water, the trees, and the gardens around the lake. The landscapes are quiet, without people, and they are built from small patches of colour that shimmer like a mosaic. They show a different side of Klimt, a man who loved nature and who could sit for hours looking at a patch of water. The landscapes were not sold as often as the portraits, but they were the pictures he painted for pleasure, and they are among his most beautiful work.
Klimt never married, and he lived a private life that has been much talked about. He had many models, and he had children with several women, though he never spoke about his private life in public. His closest family was his mother and his sisters, and he lived with them for much of his life. He was not a man who enjoyed scandal for its own sake, and he did not talk about his feelings in letters or diaries. What we know about his inner life comes from his pictures, not from his words, and that is probably how he wanted it.
The last years of his life were busy and productive. He painted portraits of younger women, he worked on a large picture called The Bride, which he left unfinished, and he planned new pictures that he never had time to make. He was still painting in 1917, when he was fifty-five, and he showed no sign of slowing down. His work had become calmer, with less gold and more soft colour, and his portraits from this period show women who look thoughtful and modern, as if they belong to the twentieth century rather than to a golden past.
In January 1918 Klimt suffered a stroke, and he died on 6 February 1918 in Vienna, at the age of fifty-five. The cause was widely reported as a stroke followed by pneumonia, and his death came at a moment when Vienna was in the middle of war and influenza. He was buried in Vienna, and his studio, with its unfinished pictures, was left as he had left it. The empire he had painted for would fall within the year, and the Vienna he knew would change forever. His pictures, though, did not fall. They stayed, and they have grown in fame ever since.
The Women He Painted
The portraits are the part of Klimt’s work that most people remember, and they deserve a closer look. He painted Adele Bloch-Bauer, Elisabeth Lederer, Johanna Staude, and other women from wealthy Viennese families, and he painted them with a care that is hard to miss. Their faces are calm, their eyes look straight at the viewer, and their bodies are wrapped in pattern, but their faces are never hidden. Klimt did not paint them as decoration. He painted them as people, and the gold around them makes them look like queens, not like ornaments. That choice mattered in a city where women were often shown as pretty and silent.
Adele Bloch-Bauer is the most famous of his sitters, and her portrait has a long and sad history. She died in 1925, and her portrait was later taken by the Nazis, along with other works from her family’s collection. After a long legal case, the portrait was returned to her niece, Maria Altmann, in 2006, and it was then sold to a museum in New York, where it now hangs. The story of that picture is not only a story about art. It is a story about a family, about theft, and about a woman whose face survived a war that tried to erase her. Klimt could not have known any of that when he painted her, but the calm in her face has outlasted the people who tried to steal it.
Klimt’s models were not only wealthy women. He also painted working women, dancers, and women from the theatre, and he painted them with the same attention. He kept a large number of life drawings, many of them erotic, and those drawings show a man who looked at the female body with curiosity and with respect, not with cruelty. Some of those drawings were considered shocking in his lifetime, and they are still discussed today. It is fair to say that Klimt was interested in desire, and that he painted it openly, and it is also fair to say that he painted women as subjects with inner lives, not as objects. Both things can be true at once.
The women in his pictures often wear loose, patterned dresses that Klimt designed himself, and he was interested in fashion as well as in painting. He worked with the designer Emilie Flöge, who ran a fashion salon in Vienna, and he designed dresses for her that were loose and comfortable, very different from the tight corsets of the time. Flöge was his companion for many years, and she was a businesswoman in her own right, not only a model. Their partnership shows a side of Klimt that is often missed: he was interested in how women lived, how they dressed, and how they moved, and he wanted to make their lives easier, not only to paint them.
Why Klimt Still Matters Today
Klimt died in 1918, and for a time his work was seen as old-fashioned, a relic of a vanished Vienna. The modern art of the twentieth century moved toward abstraction, toward rough paint and toward politics, and Klimt’s gold looked too pretty, too decorative, too tied to the past. But taste changes, and in the last fifty years his reputation has grown again, until he is now one of the most popular painters in the world. Posters of The Kiss hang in bedrooms and offices, and the Adele Bloch-Bauer portrait draws crowds in New York. The gold that once looked old-fashioned now looks timeless.
Part of the reason is that his pictures are easy to love and hard to forget. A person who knows nothing about art can look at The Kiss and feel something, and a person who knows a great deal can look at the same picture and find something new, a pattern, a reference to Byzantine mosaics, a detail in the gold. That double quality, simple on the surface and deep underneath, is rare, and it explains why his work has survived. He painted feeling, and feeling does not go out of fashion.
His influence can be seen in design, in fashion, and in film, where directors borrow his gold and his patterns to show luxury and desire. His work has also been used to tell the story of Vienna itself, a city that was once the centre of an empire and is now a place of museums and music. Klimt’s pictures are a record of that city at its most brilliant and most troubled, and they remind us that art can be both beautiful and serious, both golden and sad. He painted a world that was about to disappear, and he painted it so well that it has not disappeared at all.
My Take:
I have to admit that the first time I saw The Kiss, I thought it was a poster, not a painting. I had seen it so many times on mugs, on bags, on bedroom walls, that I assumed it was a pretty image made for decoration. Then I saw it in a book, larger and clearer, and I realised how much I had missed. The gold is not flat. It is layered, it is scratched, it is built up like a wall, and the flowers under the lovers’ knees are painted with a care that no poster can show. I felt a little embarrassed that I had dismissed it, and I also felt grateful that the picture was strong enough to survive being turned into a souvenir. That is a test of great art, I think: it survives being copied a thousand times, and it still has something left to say.
What I admire most about Klimt is that he did not start as a rebel, and he did not pretend to be one. He started as a craftsman, painting ceilings for theatres, doing what he was told, and doing it well. He learned his trade, he earned his living, and he only broke away when he had something of his own to say. I respect that order of things, because I have seen people who try to rebel before they have learned anything, and the rebellion is empty. Klimt’s rebellion was not empty. It was built on years of hard work, and when he finally said no to the university, he knew exactly what he was saying no to, and what he was saying yes to instead.
The university scandal is the part of his story that stays with me, because it shows how quickly praise can turn into attack. One day he was the emperor’s favourite decorator, and the next day eighty-seven professors were signing a petition against him. I think about how that must have felt, to have your work called obscene in the newspapers, to have people you respected turn against you. He did not apologise, and he did not paint a safer version. He bought the pictures back, and he kept working. I admire that, because it is easy to be brave when everyone agrees with you, and very hard to be brave when they do not. Klimt was brave in the quiet way that matters most, by continuing to work.
I also think about his father, the gold engraver, and how much of Klimt’s art came from that small fact. He grew up in a house where gold was not a symbol of wealth, but a material you worked with your hands. That is why his gold does not look like a rich man’s display. It looks like a craftsman’s work, careful, layered, and honest. I find that moving, because it means that his most famous quality came from his family, not from a school or a fashion. He took what his father taught him, and he turned it into something his father could never have imagined. That is a good way to honour a parent, by taking their skill and making it your own.
The portraits are where I have the most mixed feelings, and I want to be honest about them. I love the way he painted Adele Bloch-Bauer, with her calm face and her golden dress, and I love that he showed wealthy women as thoughtful people, not as pretty dolls. But I also know that those portraits were made for rich families, and that the women in them lived in a world of money and comfort that most people in Vienna never saw. Klimt painted the rich, and he was paid by the rich, and that is a fact. It does not make the pictures less beautiful, but it does mean that his art was part of a world of privilege, and I think it is worth saying that plainly. A beautiful picture can still belong to a narrow world.
His landscapes are the pictures I return to when I want to understand the man behind the gold. The Attersee paintings are quiet, they have no people, no gold, no drama, and they are built from small patches of colour that shimmer like water. I look at those pictures and I see a man who loved to sit and look, who did not need an audience, and who painted for himself. That is the side of Klimt I trust most, because it is the side that had nothing to prove. The portraits proved his skill, the university pictures proved his courage, but the landscapes prove his love of looking, and that love is the foundation of everything else.
I do not think Klimt was a perfect person, and I do not think his work is perfect either. Some of the erotic drawings feel like they belong to a private world that was never meant for the public, and some of the later portraits feel repetitive, as if he is painting the same golden woman again. I say that because I think it is important to be honest, even about an artist I admire. His best work is so strong that it does not need every picture to be a masterpiece. The Kiss, Adele Bloch-Bauer, and the Attersee landscapes are enough to carry his name, and the rest can be what it is, good work by a hard-working man.
What I take from his life is a lesson about patience and about the value of craft. Klimt did not become famous overnight, and he did not become great by having a single wild idea. He became great by working for years, by learning a trade, by painting ceilings that no one remembers, and by slowly finding his own voice. Then, when he found it, he used it with courage, and he did not let the scandal stop him. I think that is a useful story for anyone who feels stuck in a job that does not fit, or who feels that their real work is still ahead of them. Klimt was thirty-five before he broke away, and fifty before he painted The Kiss. There is time, if you keep working.
I also think about Vienna, and how Klimt’s story is also the story of a city. Vienna in 1900 was brilliant and troubled, full of music and full of fear, and Klimt painted both sides of it. The gold in his pictures is the brilliance, and the dark figures in the university paintings are the fear. He did not choose one side. He painted both, and that is why his work still feels true. A city, like a person, is never only one thing, and Klimt knew that. He painted the beauty and the trouble together, and he did not try to smooth them out.
If I could walk through Vienna with Klimt for one day, I would ask him to show me the mosaics in Ravenna that stayed in his mind, and the lake at Attersee where he painted in the summer. I would ask him what he felt when he laid the first piece of gold leaf on a canvas, and whether he knew, even then, that it would become his signature. I suspect he would not have a grand answer. I suspect he would say that he liked the way the gold caught the light, and that he kept doing it because it worked. That is a modest answer, and it fits the man I have come to see in his story: a craftsman who became an artist by paying attention, by working hard, and by refusing to paint what he did not believe in.
I think about his death, too, at fifty-five, in the middle of a war and a flu epidemic, with unfinished pictures in his studio. He did not get a long old age like Matisse, and he did not get a chance to reinvent himself in his seventies. That makes his work feel more urgent to me, as if he knew, even without knowing, that he did not have forever. He painted as if time mattered, and it did. I find that sad, and I also find it encouraging, because it reminds me not to wait for the perfect moment. Klimt did not wait. He painted the gold, he painted the women, he painted the lake, and he left a body of work that still glows. That is enough, and it is more than most of us will leave.
The story of Adele Bloch-Bauer’s portrait, stolen and then returned, stays with me as well, because it shows that a picture can outlive the people who try to own it by force. The Nazis took the portrait, but they could not take the calm in Adele’s face, and in the end the picture came back to her family. I think Klimt would have been glad to know that. He painted a woman, not a possession, and the woman’s face survived. That is a small victory in a dark history, and it is worth remembering when we look at his gold. The gold is beautiful, but the face is what lasts.
In the end, I think Klimt teaches me that beauty is not a luxury, and that craft is not a small thing. He took a material from his father’s workshop, he learned a trade, he broke with the old guard, and he made pictures that still stop people in their tracks. He did it in a city that was falling apart, and he did it without ever explaining himself in words. His pictures are his explanation, and they are enough. I hope the reader looks at The Kiss again, not as a poster, but as a painting, and sees the flowers, the gold, and the two people who have become one shape. That is what Klimt saw, and that is what he left for us.
I also think about the Secession building, with its golden dome, and about how Klimt and his friends built their own hall, because the old guard would not show their work. That is a brave act, to build your own place, rather than begging for a place in someone else’s hall. I think about the artists today who build their own galleries, their own websites, and their own audiences, because the old institutions will not show them, and I see Klimt in them. He did not wait for permission. He built a hall, he put a motto over the door, and he showed his work, and the work of others, on his own terms. That is a lesson I want to remember: if the door is closed, build your own door.
There is a sadness in his story that I cannot ignore, and it is the sadness of a city that was about to fall. Vienna in 1918 was in the middle of war, of influenza, and of the end of an empire, and Klimt died in that city, at fifty-five, with unfinished pictures in his studio. He did not live to see the new Vienna, and he did not live to see his work become famous around the world. That is sad, and it is also a reminder that an artist’s work often outlives the world it was made for, and that a picture can survive an empire, a war, and a flu, and still glow, a century later. I find that both sad and hopeful, because it means that work done with care can outlast the troubles of its time.
I think about his landscapes at the Attersee, and about how they were painted for himself, not for a buyer, and how they are now among his most loved works. That tells me something about work done for pleasure, and about how the work we do for ourselves, without thinking about money or fame, is often the work that lasts. Klimt painted portraits for money, and landscapes for pleasure, and the landscapes, which he painted quietly, in the summer, by a lake, are now as famous as the portraits. I hope the reader remembers that, the next time they do something for pleasure, without thinking about whether it will sell. That work matters, and it may be the work that lasts longest.
Finally, I want to say something about the gold itself, and about how it came from his father’s workshop. He grew up with gold, not as a symbol of wealth, but as a material, and he used it with a craftsman’s care, laying it leaf by leaf, on a surface he had prepared. That is a humble origin for a famous style, and it is one I love, because it means that his most famous quality came from his family, from a small workshop, and from a father who worked with his hands. He took that skill, and he made it into art, and he honoured his father by doing so, even if he never said it in words. His pictures say it, in gold, and that is enough.
Frequently Asked Questions
When was Gustav Klimt born and where did he grow up?
Gustav Klimt was born on 14 July 1862 in Baumgarten, near Vienna, in Austria. His father was a gold engraver, and Klimt grew up in Vienna, where he studied at the School of Arts and Crafts from the age of fourteen.
What is The Kiss by Gustav Klimt about?
The Kiss, painted between 1907 and 1908, shows a man and a woman kneeling on a flowery bank, wrapped in a single golden cloak, as the man kisses the woman’s cheek. It is widely seen as a picture of love and closeness, and it is Klimt’s most famous work.
Why did the University of Vienna reject Klimt’s paintings?
Klimt was asked to paint Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence for the university ceiling, but his pictures showed naked, swirling figures instead of clear, noble allegories. Eighty-seven faculty members signed a petition against them, and Klimt bought the pictures back.
Who was Adele Bloch-Bauer in Klimt’s work?
Adele Bloch-Bauer was a wealthy Viennese woman whom Klimt painted in 1907 in a famous gold portrait. The portrait was later taken by the Nazis, returned to her niece Maria Altmann in 2006, and is now in a museum in New York.
What was the Vienna Secession?
The Vienna Secession was a group of artists founded in 1897, with Klimt as its first president, who broke away from the conservative artists’ association. They built their own exhibition hall and showed modern art, design, and work by foreign artists.
Did Gustav Klimt paint landscapes as well as portraits?
Yes, Klimt painted many landscapes, mostly in the summer at the Attersee lake in Upper Austria. These quiet pictures of water, trees, and gardens were painted for his own pleasure and are among his most admired works.
