February 7, 2018

On Feb. 6, 1918, 100 years ago yesterday, Austrian artist Gustav Klimt died in Vienna, the capital of Austria. Klimt’s unique painting style is perhaps best remembered as sheets of gold—with the warmth of a kiss. Klimt, whose father was a gold engraver, enhanced many paintings with gold leaf, and sharp lines traced his tender human figures. Klimt was part of Austria’s Art Nouveau (New Art) movement, a decorative style of design that flourished from the 1890′s until about 1910. In Austria and Germany, Art Nouveau is known as Jugendstil.

Credit: The Kiss (1907–1908), oil on canvas by Gustav Klimt; Austrian Gallery Belvedere

Klimt was born on July 14, 1862, in the town of Baumgarten, near Vienna. He began his career as a portrait artist and decorative painter. Klimt’s murals Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence (1900-1907), done for the University of Vienna, created controversy because the figures were gloomy and sensual rather than heroic. Klimt was cofounder and president of the Wiener Sezession (Vienna Secession), a group of artists and architects who created Austria’s Jugendstil. Best known for his paintings of the human figure, Klimt painted in a flat, richly patterned, and colorful style that emphasized curving and rhythmic lines. His last major project was a group of mosaics (1911) in the Palais Stoclet in Brussels, Belgium. The mosaics are composed of glass, semiprecious gems, gold, and enamel.

In Vienna, several exhibitions are featuring Klimt works in 2018, as well as those of fellow Viennese artist Egon Schiele, a student and follower of Klimt who died on Oct. 31, 1918. (Both men were ultimately victims of the catastrophic Spanish flu epidemic.) Klimt and Schiele feature prominently in the Leopold Museum’s “Vienna 1900!” exhibition. At the Museum of Applied and Contemporary Arts, “Klimt’s Magic Garden: a Virtual Reality Experience” concentrates on the artist’s complementary mosaic masterpieces Expectation and Fulfillment.

The “Klimt bridge” has been installed in the stairway of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, from which people can view 13 Klimt paintings between arcades and pillars, and his Nuda Veritas is standing out among ancient Greek and Roman artworks in the same museum’s hall of Doryphoros of the Polykleitos. Vienna’s Belvedere Palace Museum features Klimt’s best-known work, The Kiss, and 23 other Klimt oil paintings. Nearby, the Secession exhibition hall (cofounded by Klimt in 1897) houses Klimt’s massive Beethoven Frieze mural. The city’s year-long modernism program, “Beauty and the Abyss,” also celebrates artist Koloman Moser and architect Otto Wagner, both of whom died of cancer in 1918.