Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt was born in 1862 to an Autrian jeweler, and studied at the School of Plastic Art in Vienna in his teenage years. From the age of 18 he took commissions for small decorative works. In 1897 he became the first President of the Vienna Sezession, but after he discovered the Byzantine mosaics of Vienna, he withdrew from the Sezession and became the President of the Austrian National Union of Artists in 1912. In 1917 he was granted an honorary professorship at the esteemed Viennese Academy. The early works by Klimt cause an uproar because of his scandalous subjects such as naked girls and skeletons and sexual expression. Ornamentation permeates the Klimt’s paintings, and it’s as if the bodies of his subjects are competing or struggling with the decorative background. Klimt was one of the main contributors to Art Nouveau, and his decadent style, his themes of sex and death, and his liberal expression foreshadowed the advent of modern art.