The artist we feature: Gustav Klimt     (1862-1918)

    The idea of applying gold and silver leaf  directly to his canvases probably came early to Klimt. He was born at Baumgarten, near Vienna, in 1862 - his father was an engraver in precious metals. Still, Klimt would have hardly imagined that one of his paintings would sell for thousands, perhaps millions, of times the value of precious metals he has put in it, and would create the new world record for the most expansive work of art. Yet, this is what happened in June 2006, 99 years after he painted the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the so called Golden Adele. The painting was sold in New York in a private deal, apparently for US$ 135 million. This beats the previous record, Picasso's "Boy with a pipe", by a whopping 30 million dollars!

    The painting was bought by the millionaire Ronald Lauder for the Neue Galerie at Manhattan, which specializes in the works of classics of Austrian and German painting. The painting, which was confiscated by the Nazis in 1940, was returned to Marie Altmann, the 90 year old niece of Adele Bloch-Bauer, after a long lasting dispute with the Austrian Government. It is one of the iconic works of the Viennese Secession. Adele, whose family would certainly have approved on the sweet deal, having made millions on refining and sales of the Bohemian sugar, poses in the picture as a femme fatale, virtually surrounded by gold.

Klimt first made himself known in his early twenties by the decorations he executed with his brother Ernst and their art school companion Franz Matsch for the Viennese theatres and other buildings. The trio had expanded the business soon to include theatres in other towns of the then Austro-Hungarian Empire. For me personally the interesting bit is that between 1884-86 they had worked on the decorations for the town theatre building in Karlovy Vary (also known as Carlsbad, left), in which I had played and before that worked as a stage-hand, when I was a young man in the early 1960s. The theatre itself is a miniature of the Vienna Opera House and it was designed by the architectural firm of Fellner and Helmer of Vienna. They had created the ceremonious curtain, an allegorical painting titled Apotheosis of the art of Poetry, as well as five ceiling paintings. These little known early works of Klimt deserve to be shown in some detail, which I do here and here (the curtain) and here (one of the ceiling paintings). I keep these works separate from the rest of this artist's gallery, because they are not entirely the artist's works, though he was almost certainly the leading hand in the trio. However, they are nice examples of Klimt's very early work. Incidentally, when I came to Karlovy Vary in 1990, soon after the fall of the Communist regime, I went to see the theatre. I found that it was in an absolutely lamentable condition. Soon after however it was declared a heritage building, within ten years or so it was repaired, and the Klimt curtain was restored by a team of specialists. 

    The success of the team of young men — for instance, by the time they had finished work at the Karlovy Vary Theatre, none of them would have yet reached the age of 25 — was not to last. Ernst Klimt , who was two years younger than Gustav, died suddenly at the age of only 28. One wonders what might have happened if the association had not thus been broken? The chances are that the two brothers would have continued the business of decorating buildings. and  the paintings that were to make Klimt really famous later might not have ever happened... Franz Matsch had already shown signs of wanting to develop his art (mainly portraiture) individually, which he eventually did with some success. But the death of his brother, and of his father, which came almost at the same time, virtually forced Gustav to set himself up in his own painting studio. By now in his early thirties, he turned to easel painting, becoming fashionable as a portrait painter, particularly among the upper class ladies of Vienna. He also gained reputation as a landscape artist. Klimt became one of the founders of the Vienna Secession in 1897, but he withdrew from the movement eight years later, together with several other artists, to form a new association named Kunstschau or Art Show. At the same time, Klimt was never far from the controversy. His work was condemned by many of the contemporary critics as being too sensual and erotic, and the allegories in his pictures were being held as abnormal and deviant, particularly as he became more and more experimental with his work.

    Gustav Klimt died in Vienna on February 6, 1918. Many of his paintings were left unfinished in the studio, some of which were of nude models, and the indications are that the subjects of his portrait paintings probably posed naked, before they were amply clad in the gold, the silver and the Art Noveau decorations. Again, one cannot help wondering: Would the amounts of precious metals that went into the paintings had been in direct proportion to the means of the Viennese ladies posing for the portraits? Or of their husbands? Could you sense a nice theme for a suspense novel? I'm afraid you would be too late. Roald Dahl already wrote such a story, very likely inspired by the Gustav Klimt story.