“I am a painter who paints day after day from morning until night.” But the details he did leave behind tell a different story. There is nothing special about me,” he once said. “I am convinced that I am not particularly interesting as a person. Klimt didn’t like to talk about his personal life or work. But there’s far more to the painter’s life and oeuvre than The Kiss. Museums sell more color reproductions of Klimt’s paintings than those of any other artist. When Auguste Rodin visited Klimt’s famed Beethoven Frieze (1902), part of the Viennese Secession’s 14th exhibition, he lauded the piece as “so tragic and so divine.” A younger generation of European Expressionists, including Egon Schiele, lionized Klimt and latched onto him as their hero.
His artist peers were similarly enthralled with his style, recognizing Klimt’s groundbreaking injection of sexuality, atmosphere, and expression into figurative painting. His more risqué pieces, depicting voluptuous nudes and piles of entwined bodies, scandalized the Viennese establishment.Įven so, the city’s elite adored his work and frequently commissioned him to paint their portraits. Often, their messages-of pleasure, sexual liberation, and human suffering-were only thinly veiled. He embedded allusions to sexuality and the human psyche in the rich, lavishly decorated figures and patterns that populated his canvases, murals, and mosaics. Klimt, the leader of the Vienna Secession movement, was a master of symbolism. The side covering the man is decorated with erect rectangles, while the woman’s is swathed with concentric circles. He binds their bodies together in the same cloth: a shimmering gold tapestry whose pattern references both intimacy and anatomy. Most of us know Gustav Klimt as the artist who painted The Kiss, that 1907 masterpiece in which two figures melt into each other in a hungry embrace.
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