1. Gustave Klimt
He was born in 1862 into an artistic Viennese family and received his education at Vienna’s School of Fine Arts.
He began his career with a commission to decorate the ceiling of the grand staircase at the Burg Theater, among the most prominent Viennese buildings and the most important venue for high society.
Klimt turned his energies to the Vienna Secession, of which he had been a founding member. His Secessionist style departed from his earlier traditional naturalism and was based on the sinuous linearity of Jugendstil.
Klimt played a critical role in the foundation, in 1897, and leadership of the Viennese Secession, a progressive group of artists and artisans driven by a desire for innovation and renewal. The philosophy of the Secession embraced not only art but also architecture and design that included the simple furniture and dazzling decorative art objects of the Wiener Werkstätte. They pursued the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) aspiring to a synthesis of all the arts as championed by the composer Richard Wagner (1813 to 1883).

2. Poster for the First Secession Exhibition 1898
Gustave Klimt
Poster for the First Secession Exhibition
1898
Klimt played a critical role in the foundation, in 1897, and leadership of the Viennese Secession, a progressive group of artists and artisans driven by a desire for innovation and renewal. The philosophy of the Secession embraced not only art but also architecture and design that included the simple furniture and dazzling decorative art objects of the Wiener Werkstätte. They pursued the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) aspiring to a synthesis of all the arts as championed by the composer Richard Wagner (1813 to 1883).

3. Gustave Klimt
The Three Ages of Woman
1905

4. Gustave Klimt
Adele Bloch-Bauer I
1907

5. Gustave Klimt
The Kiss

6. Gustave Klimt Apple Tree 1912

7. Gustave Klimt The Park 1909-1910
Klimt’s landscapes are now a highly admired aspect of his oeuvre. A particular feature of the works is their standard size and square format, a device Klimt used with their exhibition in mind. The uniformity of his landscapes in this one respect highlights their diversity in many others. Throughout, it is possible to point to corresponding shifts in Klimt's approach to the portraits and allegories on which he worked in Vienna. Many unfinished landscapes were taken back to his Vienna studio for completion. It is thought, for instance, that Litzlberg on the Attersee 1915 was completed with the aid of postcards and photographs.
Klimt's landscapes express his wider concerns with biological growth and the cycle of life. Their dazzling decorative surfaces and abstracted motifs align him with emergent modernist tendencies. The trees depicted in Pine Forest I1901 seem stylised, rendered in a strict vertical rhythm with reduced spatial depth, the quasi-pointillist brushstrokes recalling the treatment of costume in his portraits of Marie Henneberg and Hermine Gallia. The foliage in The Park 1909–10 is similarly flattened while his late Garden Landscape with Hilltop 1916 recalls the symbiosis of naturalism and ornament in the contemporary work of Egon Schiele (1890–1918).
Gustave Klimt The Park

8. Gustave Klimt
Baby