Gustav Klimt
The first of seven children, Gustav Klimt was born on 14 July 1862 in Vienna. In 1876 he entered the newly founded Kunstgewerbeschule (School for Applied Arts), where he studied painting with Ferdinand Laufberger and Victor Julius Berger. In 1879 Gustav Klimt, his brother Ernst Klimt (1864-1892), and Franz von Matsch (1861-1942), founded the Künstlercompagnie, an artists' co-op that produced numerous historicizing, decorative wall paintings in public buildings. When in 1894 the co-op received the commission to decorate the lobby of the University of Vienna with allegorical paintings of the different faculties, Klimt began to go his own way stylistically with innovative designs for his paintings of Philosophy(1899-1907), Medicine (1900-1901), and Law (never completed; all three destroyed during World War II).
Klimt left the artists' co-op in 1897, when he became president of the newly founded Vienna Secession. He exhibited Philosophy at the seventh Secession exhibition in 1900; Medicine at the tenth exhibition in 1901, where its depiction of a naked and pregnant woman met with much protest; and all three, along with his great Beethoven Frieze(now installed in the Vienna Secession building) in the Klimt retrospective exhibition of 1903. This same year Klimt made a trip to Ravenna, where he saw the Early Christian mosaics of San Apollinare in Classe, which inspired the highly decorated backgrounds and clothing of his "golden style."
As the Secession became increasingly fractious, Klimt and other practitioners of Art Nouveau abandoned the group to organize their own Kunstschau in 1905. Klimt exhibited less frequently and returned to the subjects of his earlier work, landscapes and portraits of upper-middle-class Viennese women, from which he earned his living. He also produced many drawings and paintings inspired by highly active erotic sensibilities. Klimt's relationships with women were unusual. Living with his mother, and after her death, with his two unmarried sisters all his life, he had so many affairs with his models that fourteen paternity suits were filed against his estate after his death. His closest friend was Emilie Flöge, whom he never married, but with whom he maintained a life long faithful platonic relationship. Klimt died on 6 February 1918, three weeks after suffering a stroke.
