Gustav Klimt

This is the first of a series in which each book uses closely-integrated text and pictures to place an artist in his own time and place, and to recreate the atmosphere and texture of the world he inhabited. Gustav Klimt, the celebrated painter of fin-de-siecle Vienna, produced portraits of society women, allegorical figure-compositions and sumptuous decorative schemes which evoke the exciting decadent atmosphere of one of Europe's great cities before World War I. Vienna was being transformed - physically, socially and intellectually - by influential personalities such as Sigmund Freud, Robert Musil and Gustav Mahler, and Klimt was at the heart of its intense cultural life. Klimt's work is seen to be inseparable from his intimate personal experience and his social and artistic milieu. His own paintings, letters and diaries, interspersed with observations by his contemporaries, are interwoven with narrative text to tell the story of his life.