Austrian painter Gustav Klimt was Vienna’s most renowned advocator of Art Nouveau, or, as the style was known in Germany, Jugendstil (“youth style”). He is remembered as one of the greatest decorative painters of the twentieth century, and he also produced one of the century’s most significant bodies of erotic art. Initially successful as a conventional academic painter, his encounter with more modern trends in European art encouraged him to develop his own eclectic and often fantastic style. His position as the co-founder and first president of the Vienna Secession also ensured that this style would become widely influential – though Klimt’s direct influence on other artists was limited. He never courted scandal, but it dogged his career, and although he never married, he is said to have fathered fourteen children.

His main Ideas & concepts

Klimt first achieved acclaim as a conventional academic painter, and received many commissions to paint public buildings. He later abandoned both the realism, and the approach to historical subject matter, which were characteristic of the 19th century. However, his interest in the decorative possibilities of painting could be seen as typical of the period’s love of grandeur and elaboration. It might also be interpreted as an attempt to reconcile the natural and the artificial, a typical preoccupation of the 19th century, as modern technology began to transform the world beyond recognition.

While some of Klimt’s contemporaries were vigorously opposed to decoration, Klimt was surely the period’s most outstanding exponent. He strongly believed in the equality of fine and decorative art, and some of his work shows his ambition to create a Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”), a union of the visual arts that might be created through ornament. He was also closely associated with the Wiener Werkstatte, the design studio which worked to improve the quality of everyday objects.

Klimt was one of the most influential exponents of Art Nouveau, the movement which spread throughout Europe in the late 19th century. His approach was inspired by the ethereal atmosphere of work by artists such as Aubrey Beardsley, and by some aspects of Impressionist technique; it was also determinedly eclectic, borrowing motifs from Byzantine, Greek and Egyptian art.

Although his art is now widely popular, it was neglected for much of the 20th century, and provoked opposition in his own day, facing charges of obscenity and objections to his lightly allusive approach to symbolism. His treatment of erotic themes was generally delicate and veiled in his paintings, but his drawings gave full expression to his considerable sexual appetite.