Who Was Gustav Klimt and Why Is His Work So Important?

Klimt’s Vienna was the seat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire led by Franz Joseph I, the retired Habsburg emperor who led polyglot peoples (Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, and Slovenes, among others) in calling for independence—an unsustainable situation that ultimately led to World War I and the end of the empire.

The same riots made Vienna a hotbed of radical cultural trends, reflecting a country plagued by sexual and political anxieties. Klimt co-founded a secession movement, the Vienna Secession, and along with his compatriots Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka revolutionized figurative painting. Composers Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg did the same with classical music, and Sigmund Freud upended the field of medicine by introducing psychoanalysis and its concept of the subconscious mind unlocking the secrets of human behavior.

Vienna was also filled with resentment, including that of one man, which would lead to one of the greatest disasters in history. A contemporary of Klimt, the young Adolf Hitler wandered the city as a failed and sometimes homeless artist. By his own account, it’s there my struggleHitler developed a annihilationist disgust for the Jews, making Vienna arguably the birthplace of the Holocaust.

In fact, anti-Semitism was rife in the imperial capital, even though Jews constituted only a small proportion of the population. However, they were overrepresented among the wealthy and cultured elite, some of whom were Klimt’s patrons. For example, Elisabeth Lederer was the daughter of a famous Jewish industrialist, while Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) was commissioned by the subject’s husband, a banker and sugar producer who was also Jewish. Because Klimt’s paintings found their way into the hands of so many Jews, his works became ripe targets for Nazi plunder after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938.