Gustav Klimt
Austrian, 1862–1918
Klimt left the artists' co-op in 1897, when he became president of the newly founded Vienna Secession. He exhibited Philosophy at the seventh Secession exhibition in 1900; Medicine at the tenth exhibition in 1901, where its depiction of a naked and pregnant woman met with much protest; and all three, along with his great Beethoven Frieze(now installed in the Vienna Secession building) in the Klimt retrospective exhibition of 1903. This same year Klimt made a trip to Ravenna, where he saw the Early Christian mosaics of San Apollinare in Classe, which inspired the highly decorated backgrounds and clothing of his "golden style."
As the Secession became increasingly fractious, Klimt and other practitioners of Art Nouveau abandoned the group to organize their own Kunstschau in 1905. Klimt exhibited less frequently and returned to the subjects of his earlier work, landscapes and portraits of upper-middle-class Viennese women, from which he earned his living. He also produced many drawings and paintings inspired by highly active erotic sensibilities. Klimt's relationships with women were unusual. Living with his mother, and after her death, with his two unmarried sisters all his life, he had so many affairs with his models that fourteen paternity suits were filed against his estate after his death. His closest friend was Emilie Flöge, whom he never married, but with whom he maintained a life long faithful platonic relationship. Klimt died on 6 February 1918, three weeks after suffering a stroke.
