Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt: Gold Leaf Over an Abyss

In May 1945, retreating German forces set fire to Schloss Immendorf in Lower Austria, and three enormous paintings burned with it. They were *Philosophy*, *Medicine* and *Jurisprudence* — the ceiling panels Gustav Klimt had made for the University of Vienna, which had been so violently rejected as obscene that they were never installed. Klimt had taken the commission as Austria's most decorated young painter, holder of the Emperor's Gold Cross of Merit. He finished it as a man who would never accept a public commission again. Everything that makes him interesting happened in the space between.

The Engraver's Son

He was born on 14 July 1862 in Baumgarten, on the edge of Vienna, the second of seven children of Ernst Klimt the Elder, a gold engraver of Bohemian peasant stock. The family was poor in the specific, humiliating way of skilled artisans without steady work: they moved at least five times between 1862 and 1884, chasing cheaper rooms. His five-year-old sister Anna died in 1874; his eldest sister Klara suffered severe mental disturbance. The father's trade is not incidental. Klimt grew up watching a man beat gold into decorative surfaces for a living, and forty years later he would put gold leaf directly onto canvas in a way no serious European painter had done for centuries.

His drawing was conspicuous enough in ordinary school that at fourteen he was sent to the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule, the School of Applied Arts, where he studied architectural painting from 1876 to 1883 under Ferdinand Laufberger and then Julius Victor Berger. Note the discipline: not fine art but *applied* art, decoration for buildings. He was trained as a craftsman for hire, and he never entirely stopped thinking like one.

The Golden Boy of the Ringstrasse

His brother Ernst followed him to the school in 1877, where both met Franz von Matsch. By 1880 the three had formed the Künstlercompagnie, the Company of Artists, and were taking decorative commissions across the empire and beyond — Fiume, Reichenberg, Karlsbad, Bucharest. After leaving the school in 1883 they set up a joint studio and landed the prize job of the era: ceiling and spandrel murals for the staircases of Vienna's new Burgtheater, executed between 1886 and 1888.

The establishment loved him. Franz Joseph I awarded him the Gold Cross of Merit in 1888, then the highest artistic honour in Austria. His meticulous *Audience at the Old Burgtheater* won the newly created Kaiserpreis in 1890 and made him a fixture in Viennese high society. At twenty-eight, Klimt was a virtuoso illusionist working in Neo-Renaissance and Neo-Baroque idioms, the natural heir to Hans Makart, the history painter he had idolised. He was, by every external measure, finished as an artist — successful, decorated, and going nowhere.

1892

Then his father died of a stroke and his brother Ernst died of pericarditis, both within months, both in 1892. Klimt inherited financial responsibility for two households and stopped producing much of anything. The Belvedere, which holds the world's largest collection of his work, describes what followed as a prolonged crisis that fundamentally altered his artistic approach and his view of the world. He began questioning the conventions he had mastered. The partnership with Matsch dissolved; Matsch moved out of the shared studio.

Around this time he met Emilie Louise Flöge, a fashion designer and the sister of his dead brother's widow. She became the central relationship of his life, almost certainly unconsummated — scholars generally read it as platonic — and it lasted until his death. He designed garments she produced and modelled, painted her full-length portrait in 1902, and many art historians see the two of them in *The Kiss*.

Secession

In 1897 Klimt and a group of allies walked out of the conservative Künstlerhaus and founded the Vienna Secession, with Klimt as its first president. The motto cut into the facade of their building still reads: *To the age its art, to art its freedom.* The group wanted its own exhibition system, foreign work shown in Vienna, and — crucially — the collapse of the hierarchy separating painting and sculpture from architecture and the applied arts. That was the *Gesamtkunstwerk* idea, the total work of art, and it was a natural programme for a man trained in a school of applied art. They published *Ver Sacrum*, "Sacred Spring." Klimt's imagery shifted from illusionistic depth toward flat, symbolic, deliberately ambiguous surfaces, and toward figures like Nuda Veritas, naked truth held up as a reproach to Viennese respectability.

The Faculty Paintings

He had been commissioned in 1894 to help decorate the Great Hall of the University of Vienna, and delivered around 1900. What the university got was not allegory as anyone expected it. *Philosophy*, *Medicine* and *Jurisprudence* were dark, sexualised, and refused to say anything reassuring about reason, healing or justice. Critics called them pornographic. Objections arrived from political, aesthetic and religious quarters simultaneously — an achievement of a kind. The paintings were never mounted. Klimt withdrew from state patronage permanently and, from then on, worked for private clients, principally Vienna's assimilated Jewish haute bourgeoisie, the only social layer in the city willing to buy what he wanted to make. The originals burned at Immendorf in 1945 and survive only in photographs.

Gold

From 1900 he became, as he is still described, the painter of women, producing roughly one large female portrait a year, and he began laying gold and silver leaf directly into his paintings — the Golden Phase. The sources are Byzantine mosaic, Japanese art, and his father's trade. The effect deliberately destroys illusionistic space: skin is rendered as shimmering translucent flesh while everything around it collapses into flat metallic pattern. *Pallas Athena* (1898), *Judith I* (1901), *Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I* (1907), *The Kiss* (1907–08), and the *Stoclet Frieze* (1905–1911), of which he said its dining room was "probably the ultimate stage of my development of ornament."

Each summer he went to the Attersee with the Flöge family and painted landscapes — the only subject besides the human figure that seriously held him. Locals called him *Waldschrat*, forest demon. Those canvases flatten deep space so aggressively that scholars suspect he composed them through a telescope. At home he worked in sandals and a long smock with nothing underneath, avoided the coffee-house culture that defined Viennese intellectual life, and rarely socialised with other artists. He fathered at least fourteen children; four were legally recognised after his death. "I have never painted a self-portrait," he wrote. "I am less interested in myself as a subject for a painting than I am in other people, above all women."

On 11 January 1918 a stroke paralysed his right side. He died in Vienna on 6 February of pneumonia following Spanish flu, fifty-five years old, leaving a studio full of unfinished canvases.

Why Gustav Is Called a Genius

The case rests on one specific and genuinely rare capacity: Klimt could hold two incompatible pictorial systems on a single surface without the picture falling apart. In *Adele Bloch-Bauer I* the face and hands are modelled with the full illusionistic skill of a Ringstrasse muralist, while everything else is flat, non-spatial, metallic ornament. Those two languages should cancel each other. In his hands the collision becomes the subject — a living person half-dissolved into decoration, which is as precise an image of Vienna in 1907 as anyone produced. He also had the nerve to throw away a completed, decorated, lucrative career at thirty in order to become a harder artist, which is a form of intelligence people rarely count as one.

The counter-case is blunt and comes from art historians, not detractors. Frank Whitford put it flatly: Klimt "is an important artist — he's a very popular artist — but in terms of the history of art, he's a very unimportant artist... he's an artist really in a cul-de-sac." The charge has force. Klimt founded no movement that outlived him and taught no successors in his manner; Cubism, Expressionism and abstraction all came from elsewhere. His ornament was a terminal refinement, not a door. And his enormous posthumous market value — among the highest ever paid for paintings — measures decorative appeal at least as much as artistic consequence. He is best understood not as a pivot in art history but as its most gifted dead end.

Legacy

The Belvedere holds the largest Klimt collection in the world, with *The Kiss* at its centre, alongside *Judith I*, *Sonja Knips* and *Adele Bloch-Bauer I* — an institution he supported in its earlier form as the Modern Gallery. His Secession building still stands with its motto intact. A century after his death, an artist once condemned as pornographic is the most reproduced painter in Europe, which would probably have amused him less than it should. "Whoever wants to know something about me," he said, "ought to look carefully at my pictures."

Achievements

• Villa Romana Prize — 1905
• Notable work: Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I
• Notable work: Beethoven Frieze
• Notable work: The Kiss
• Notable work: Judith I
• Movement: Symbolism and Art Nouveau