Klimt

Gold, flowers and female beauty: The work of the great Austrian symbolist

Gustav Klimt’s ornate art expresses the apocalyptic atmosphere of Vienna’s upper middle-class society around the turn of the 20th century—a society devoted to the cultivation of aesthetic awareness and the cult of pleasure.

The ecstatic joy which Klimt (1862–1918) and his contemporaries found—or hoped to find—in beauty was constantly overshadowed by death. And …