Gustav Klimt

Gus­tav KLIMT was born in Baum­garten in 1862. From 1876 to 1883 attend­ed the arts and crafts school. 1880 Found­ing of the “artist com­pa­ny” togeth­er with his broth­er Ernst and fel­low stu­dent Franz Matsch, who take on the dec­o­ra­tion jobs. Inspired by the French paint­ing of Impres­sion­ism, Sym­bol­ism, Pre-Raphaelite art and Ger­man Art Nou­veau, Klimt devel­oped a specif­i­cal­ly Aus­tri­an form of Art Nou­veau. In 1897 he found­ed a new artists’ asso­ci­a­tion. The group is called “Seces­sion”. Klimt is elect­ed its first pres­i­dent. Klimt began paint­ing por­traits even before the turn of the cen­tu­ry. Ini­tial­ly designed in a nat­u­ral­is­tic way, he dis­pensed with spa­tial rep­re­sen­ta­tion in his lat­er por­traits and thus also paved the way for abstract art. The two-dimen­sion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion is also char­ac­ter­is­tic of his land­scape paint­ings. Gus­tav Klimt dies in Vien­na in 1918. 1934 — first par­tic­i­pa­tion in an exhi­bi­tion, 1935 — first solo exhi­bi­tion at Galerie Welz.