Gustav Klimt

Gus­tav KLIMT was born in Baum­garten in 1862. From 1876 to 1883, he attend­ed the School of Arts and Crafts. In 1880, togeth­er with his broth­er Ernst and fel­low stu­dent Franz Matsch, he found­ed the “Kün­stler­com­pag­nie”, which took on dec­o­ra­tive com­mis­sions. Inspired by French Impres­sion­ist paint­ing, Sym­bol­ism, the art of the Pre-Raphaelites and Ger­man Art Nou­veau, Klimt devel­oped a specif­i­cal­ly Aus­tri­an form of Art Nou­veau. In 1897, he found­ed a new artists’ asso­ci­a­tion. The group called itself the “Seces­sion”. Klimt was elect­ed its first pres­i­dent. Klimt began paint­ing por­traits even before the turn of the cen­tu­ry. Ini­tial­ly still nat­u­ral­is­tic in style, he dis­pensed with spa­tial depic­tions in his lat­er por­traits and thus also became a pio­neer of abstract art. The two-dimen­sion­al depic­tion also became char­ac­ter­is­tic of his land­scape paint­ings. Gus­tav Klimt died in Vien­na in 1918. 1934 — first par­tic­i­pa­tion in an exhi­bi­tion, 1935 — first solo exhi­bi­tion at Galerie Welz.