Gustav Klimt

Born in Vienna in 1862, Gustav Klimt began his career painting grand public interiors before becoming one of the leading figures of the Vienna Secession. By the late 1890s, he had moved away from academic painting toward a more radical language of pattern, symbolism, eroticism and flattened space.

Across portraits, landscapes, allegorical paintings and studies of the female figure, he returned again and again to beauty, desire, mortality and the uneasy closeness between love and death.

Klimt died in Vienna in 1918, leaving behind a body of work that helped define turn-of-the-century European art.