Gustav Klimt

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. In this book, an authority on 19th- and 20th-century German and Austrian art tells the story of Klimt's life, interspersing it with the observations of his contemporaries. Throughout, Klimt's own paintings, drawings and preliminary sketches are interwoven with photographs of his friends and subjects, and the social and artistic milieu in which he thrived.