Gustav Klimt Art Prints

Klimt was born in 1862 in Baumgarten, near Vienna, the son of a gold engraver — a trade that later shaped his signature use of gold leaf. Trained at the Vienna School of Applied Arts, he began as a conventional muralist, decorating the Burgtheater and Kunsthistorisches Museum. In 1897 he co-founded the Vienna Secession, breaking from the conservative Künstlerhaus to champion Symbolism, ornament, and international modernism under the motto 'To every age its art.'

After 1901, Klimt entered his 'Golden Phase,' layering gold and silver leaf over oil paint in works like Judith I and The Kiss, drawing on Byzantine mosaics he had studied in Ravenna. His paintings of women — sensuous, ornamented, often controversial — dominated Viennese salons even as critics attacked his University of Vienna ceiling murals as pornographic. He never married; his lifelong companion was the fashion designer Emilie Flöge.

Klimt worked in relative seclusion, wearing simple sandals and robes in his Vienna studio, and produced hundreds of erotic drawings alongside his finished canvases. He died in Vienna on 6 February 1918, weakened by a stroke and pneumonia during the Spanish flu pandemic, leaving several paintings unfinished. A century later his gold-ground portraits and landscapes rank among the most expensive artworks ever sold at auction.