25 Gustav Klimt Quotes on Art, Beauty, and the Golden Age of Vienna

Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession art movement. The son of a gold engraver, Klimt incorporated gold leaf, elaborate patterns, and erotically charged imagery into paintings that shocked and enchanted turn-of-the-century Vienna. His most famous work, The Kiss, is one of the most reproduced paintings in the world. A deeply private man who avoided the spotlight, he fathered at least fourteen children by various women but never married, reportedly saying: "I am not interesting. I am interested in other people."

In 1907, Klimt completed The Kiss, a painting that depicted a couple locked in an embrace, their bodies dissolving into a field of gold leaf and geometric patterns. The work was purchased by the Austrian government even before it was finished, and it immediately became the defining image of Viennese art. Yet Klimt's path to this triumph had been anything but smooth. In 1900, his ceiling paintings for the University of Vienna -- depicting Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence -- provoked such outrage for their frank depictions of the human body that professors petitioned to have them removed. Klimt responded by buying back the paintings with his own money rather than compromising his vision. As he declared: "All art is erotic." That provocative statement -- equating creative expression with the most primal human drive -- captured the spirit of a painter who used beauty, sensuality, and gold to explore the deepest mysteries of human desire and connection.

Who Was Gustav Klimt?

Key Achievements and Episodes

The University Paintings Scandal

In 1894, Klimt was commissioned to paint ceiling murals for the Great Hall of the University of Vienna representing Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence. When he unveiled them, the faculty was outraged. Instead of celebrating human achievement, the paintings depicted suffering, disease, and the chaos of existence. Eighty-seven professors signed a petition against them. Klimt eventually returned his fee and took the paintings back. The scandal prompted him to co-found the Vienna Secession in 1897, breaking with the artistic establishment and pioneering a new era of Austrian art.

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I: The $135 Million Painting

Klimt’s 1907 Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, a shimmering gold-leaf portrait of a Viennese socialite, was looted by the Nazis in 1938 after Austria’s annexation. Adele’s niece, Maria Altmann, fought for decades to recover it from the Austrian government, taking the case to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2004. She won, and in 2006, the painting was purchased by Ronald Lauder for $135 million, then the highest price ever paid for a painting. The legal battle was dramatized in the 2015 film Woman in Gold.

Who Was Gustav Klimt?

Gustav Klimt was born on July 14, 1862, in Baumgarten, a suburb of Vienna, the second of seven children in the family of Ernst Klimt, a gold engraver of Bohemian origin, and Anna Klimt, a musical amateur who never realized her ambition to become a performer. The elder Klimt's craft with precious metals left an indelible mark on his son's imagination, planting the seeds for the gold-leaf technique that would later become Gustav's signature. At fourteen, Klimt enrolled at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts (Kunstgewerbeschule), where he studied architectural painting alongside his brother Ernst and their friend Franz Matsch. The three young men formed a collaborative team known as the "Company of Artists" and won prestigious commissions to decorate theaters, museums, and public buildings across the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including ceiling paintings for the Burgtheater and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

By the mid-1890s, Klimt had grown restless with the academic historicism that dominated Viennese art. The deaths of his father and brother Ernst in 1892 deepened his introspection and pushed him toward a more personal, psychologically charged style of painting. In 1897 he co-founded the Vienna Secession, a movement of progressive artists and architects who rejected the conservatism of the official Kunstlerhaus and sought to unite fine art, decorative art, and design under a single radical banner. As the Secession's first president, Klimt championed exhibitions that introduced Vienna to the work of Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, and Symbolists from across Europe. His own contributions -- above all, the allegorical ceiling paintings Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence commissioned for the University of Vienna -- provoked violent controversy for their frank depictions of nudity and suffering, and were ultimately rejected by the university authorities.

The decade between 1903 and 1913 is often called Klimt's "Golden Phase," and it produced the works for which he is most celebrated. Inspired by the Byzantine mosaics he had seen in Ravenna, by Japanese ukiyo-e prints, and by the Arts and Crafts movement, Klimt developed a dazzling technique that embedded figures within shimmering fields of gold leaf, geometric patterns, and organic ornamentation. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), The Kiss (1907--1908), and the mosaic frieze for the Palais Stoclet in Brussels represent the summit of this style -- images in which the human body dissolves into ornament and ornament becomes as emotionally charged as flesh. Alongside his public commissions, Klimt produced hundreds of drawings -- mostly of women in states of undress or erotic abandon -- that are today regarded as masterpieces of line and intimacy.

In his later years Klimt moved away from gold toward a richer, more colorful palette influenced by the Fauves and by the work of younger Viennese artists such as Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, both of whom he mentored. His luminous landscapes of Lake Attersee and the gardens of the Salzkammergut became increasingly abstract and are now seen as precursors to twentieth-century color-field painting. Throughout his life Klimt remained intensely private; he never married, though he maintained a lifelong partnership with the fashion designer Emilie Floge and fathered at least fourteen children by various models and companions. On January 11, 1918, Klimt suffered a stroke; he contracted influenza during the pandemic sweeping Europe and died on February 6, 1918, at the age of fifty-five. He left behind an unfinished masterpiece, The Bride, and a legacy that continues to define the meeting point of beauty, desire, and decorative splendor in modern art.

Gustav Klimt Quotes on Art and the Creative Process

Klimt's approach to art and the creative process was revolutionary in fin-de-siècle Vienna, where he led the breakaway Vienna Secession movement in 1897, declaring "To every age its art, to every art its freedom." The son of a gold engraver from Baumgarten, he absorbed metalworking techniques from his father's workshop that would later culminate in the shimmering gold-leaf surfaces of his most famous paintings. His controversial University of Vienna ceiling paintings — Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence, commissioned in 1894 — scandalized the academic establishment with their frank eroticism and were ultimately destroyed by the Nazis in 1945. Working in his studio on the Josefstädterstraße, where he painted barefoot in a long blue smock surrounded by cats, Klimt produced an average of only three major paintings per year, each one meticulously crafted over months of preparation.

Gustav Klimt Quotes on Beauty and Sensuality

Klimt's celebration of beauty and sensuality reached its apex during his "Golden Phase" between 1903 and 1910, when he incorporated gold leaf, silver, and elaborate ornamentation into paintings that transformed the female body into icon-like images of desire and transcendence. The Kiss (1907-1908), depicting a couple embracing on a flowered cliff edge wrapped in gold, became one of the most reproduced paintings in the world and a universal symbol of romantic love. His portraits of wealthy Viennese women — including the celebrated Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), which sold for $135 million in 2006 — combined psychological insight with decorative opulence in a style that was entirely his own. Klimt produced thousands of erotic drawings throughout his career, sketching models who moved freely through his studio, and these uninhibited works reveal an artist for whom beauty and desire were inseparable from the creative impulse.

Gustav Klimt Quotes on Vision and Individuality

Klimt's commitment to individual artistic vision made him the natural leader of the Vienna Secession, which he co-founded in 1897 with architects Josef Hoffmann and Joseph Maria Olbrich. The movement's exhibition hall, designed by Olbrich with Klimt's input, bore the inscription "To every age its art, to every art its freedom" above its entrance — a manifesto for creative independence. His monumental Beethoven Frieze, created for the Secession's 1902 exhibition honoring the composer, was a 112-foot-long allegorical painting that depicted humanity's search for happiness through art. Klimt resigned from the Secession in 1905 over disputes about commercialism but continued to pursue his singular vision. He drew obsessive inspiration from Byzantine mosaics he had seen during a visit to Ravenna in 1903, Japanese woodblock prints, and the decorative arts of ancient Egypt and Mycenae.

Gustav Klimt Quotes on Life and the Human Condition

Despite his fame and influence, Klimt was intensely private — he never wrote an autobiography, kept no diary, and famously declared "I am not interesting" when asked about his personal life. He never married but fathered at least fourteen children by various women, and he maintained an especially close relationship with his sister-in-law and lifelong companion Emilie Flöge, a fashion designer whose salon was a center of Viennese modernism. In his later years, he moved away from gold toward richly colored landscapes of the Attersee region, where he spent summers painting gardens, forests, and lakeside views that influenced the Expressionist painters who followed him. He died on February 6, 1918, following a stroke, at age 55 — just months before the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that had been the cultural backdrop for his entire extraordinary career.

Frequently Asked Questions About Gustav Klimt

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