30 Facts About Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement.

Gustav Klimt subsequently accepted no more public commissions, but achieved a new success with the paintings of his "golden phase", many of which include gold leaf.

Gustav Klimt's work was an important influence on his younger peer Egon Schiele.

Gustav Klimt's father, Ernst Klimt the Elder, formerly from Bohemia, was a gold engraver.

Gustav Klimt lived in poverty while attending the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule, a school of applied arts and crafts, now the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where he studied architectural painting from 1876 until 1883.

Gustav Klimt revered Vienna's foremost history painter of the time, Hans Makart.

In 1888 Gustav Klimt received the Golden Order of Merit from Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria for his contributions to murals painted in the Burgtheater in Vienna.

Gustav Klimt became an honorary member of the University of Munich and the University of Vienna.

Gustav Klimt's painting, The Kiss, is thought to be an image of them as lovers which was painted five years after Klimt's 1902 full-length portrait of her.

Gustav Klimt designed many costumes that she produced and modeled in his works.

Gustav Klimt became one of the founding members and president of the Wiener Sezession in 1897 and of the group's periodical, Ver Sacrum.

In 1894, Gustav Klimt was commissioned to create three paintings to decorate the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna.

In 1902, Gustav Klimt finished the Beethoven Frieze for the Fourteenth Vienna Secessionist exhibition, which was intended to be a celebration of the composer and featured a monumental polychrome sculpture by Max Klinger.

Deep space in the Attersee works is flattened so efficiently to a single plane that it is believed that Gustav Klimt painted them by using a telescope.

Gustav Klimt had previously used gold in his Pallas Athene and Judith I, although the works most popularly associated with this period are the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I and The Kiss.

Gustav Klimt traveled little, but trips to Venice and Ravenna, both famous for their beautiful mosaics, most likely inspired his gold technique and his Byzantine imagery.

In 1905, Gustav Klimt painted The Three Ages of Woman, depicting the cycle of life.

Gustav Klimt created a painted portrait of Margarete Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein's sister, on the occasion of her marriage.

Gustav Klimt avoided cafe society and seldom socialized with other artists.

Gustav Klimt's painting method was very deliberate and painstaking at times and he required lengthy sittings by his subjects.

Gustav Klimt wrote mostly postcards to Floge and kept no diary.

Gustav Klimt died three years later in Vienna on 6 February 1918, having suffered a stroke and pneumonia brought about by the worldwide influenza epidemic of that year.

Gustav Klimt was buried at the Hietzinger Cemetery in Hietzing, Vienna.

Between 1980 and 1984 Alice Strobl published the three-volume catalogue raisonne, which records and describes all drawings by Gustav Klimt known at the time in chronological order.

Gustav Klimt's paintings have brought some of the highest prices recorded for individual works of art.

In November 2003, Gustav Klimt's Landhaus am Attersee sold for $29,128,000, but that sale was eclipsed by prices paid for Willem de Kooning's Woman III and later Gustav Klimt's own Adele Bloch-Bauer II, the latter of which sold for $150 million in 2016.

On 7 August 2006, Christie's auction house announced it was handling the sale of the remaining four works by Klimt that were recovered by Maria Altmann and her co-heirs after their long legal battle against Austria.

Gustav Klimt's struggle became the subject of the dramatic film the Woman in Gold, a movie inspired by Stealing Klimt, the documentary featuring Maria Altmann herself.

Artists who reinterpreted Gustav Klimt's work include Slovak artist Rudolf Fila.

Already during his lifetime Gustav Klimt influenced other artists, such as the Italian Liberty style artist Galileo Chini.