Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) began as a successful decorator of public buildings and might have stayed one, but the ceiling paintings he made for Vienna University were attacked as pornographic and ugly, and he withdrew from state commissions for good. He founded the Vienna Secession, and in the golden phase that followed he laid gold leaf over Byzantine pattern and put a recognisable modern face in the middle of it. The Kiss and the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer come from those years. He also made the Beethoven Frieze and a body of quiet square landscapes that almost nobody associates with his name, plus thousands of drawings of women that are franker than anything he showed in public. This archive holds high-resolution scans of his work, free to preview and available as originals for printing.