Gustav Klimt

Klimt’s father was a gold engraver, which is not a coincidence. He trained as an architectural decorator and spent his twenties painting ceilings and staircases for the grand new buildings along Vienna’s Ringstrasse, working alongside his brother Ernst until Ernst died young.

The respectable career ended with the university ceiling paintings. Commissioned in the 1890s, they were attacked as obscene by professors and press alike, and Klimt eventually returned the fee and kept the pictures. He took almost no public commissions afterwards.

The gold paintings came next, made between roughly 1901 and 1909: flattened figures, Byzantine pattern, actual gold leaf. The Kiss belongs to this stretch and is the most reproduced image in Austrian art.

He lived quietly with his mother and sisters, painted in a smock with nothing underneath, and left several canvases unfinished when a stroke killed him in 1918, months before the empire he had decorated stopped existing.