Gustav Klimt: The Gold Engraver’s Son, Ravenna 1903, “Fetch Emilie,” and the $135 Million Woman in Gold

Last updated: May 2026 · By Stanislav Arnautov · Berlin

Gustav Klimt (14 July 1862 – 6 February 1918) is the most commercially dominant and most romantically iconic artist of the Vienna Secession and the Art Nouveau movement. His Golden Phase paintings — The Kiss, the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, Judith I, the Tree of Life — are among the most reproduced images in the world. And yet the biographical reality behind the gold is far stranger and more specific than the surface romanticism suggests: a gold-engraver’s son who used real gold leaf; a man who had at least 14 children by various models and never married, but who lived with his mother until her death and whose 27-year companion received only his dying words; an artist whose work was condemned as pornographic by the Austrian establishment and whose masterpiece was stolen by the Nazis and recovered after a decade-long legal battle. At the Belvedere, Vienna (The Kiss, Judith I). DeckArts Berlin from ~$140.

Early Life: The Gold Engraver’s Son

Gustav Klimt was born on 14 July 1862 in Baumgarten, near Vienna, the second of seven children. His father, Ernst Klimt the Elder, was a gold engraver and goldsmith who had emigrated from Bohemia; his mother, Anna Klimt, had an unrealised ambition to be a musical performer. The family was poor; the economic instability of late-19th-century Vienna meant that the Klimt family frequently struggled financially, particularly during the economic crash of 1873.

The specific biographical significance of the father’s profession: Gustav Klimt grew up in a household engaged in gold engraving and goldsmithing — the precise, skilled working of gold and precious metals into decorative and functional objects. This childhood exposure to the material qualities of gold — its specific surface behaviour, its reflective properties, its application as leaf and as engraved ornament — is the most direct biographical source of the Golden Phase that would define Klimt’s mature work. The gold-engraver’s son grew up to apply real gold leaf to canvas in the same material tradition his father practised on metal objects. The material formation in the goldsmith’s workshop is the same biographical pattern that shaped Dürer (also a goldsmith’s son) and that gave both artists their specific attention to precise surface and ornamental detail.

Klimt entered the Vienna School of Applied Arts (Kunstgewerbeschule) in 1876, aged 14, where he trained as an architectural decorative painter. With his brother Ernst Klimt the Younger and their colleague Franz Matsch, he formed the “Company of Artists” (Künstler-Compagnie) and received commissions for the decorative painting of public buildings — theatres, museums, and the grand buildings of the Ringstrasse, the great boulevard of imperial Vienna. The young Klimt’s early work in this period was conventional, academic, and highly successful: he received the Golden Order of Merit from Emperor Franz Joseph in 1888 for his work on the Burgtheater. He was, in his 20s, a successful establishment decorative painter.

The Vienna Secession: “To Every Age Its Art”

In 1897, Klimt led a group of artists in seceding from the conservative Vienna Künstlerhaus (the official artists’ association) to form the Vienna Secession (Wiener Secession), of which he became the first president. The Secession’s programme: to break from the academic conservatism of the Künstlerhaus, to bring international modern art to Vienna, to abolish the hierarchy between “fine” and “applied” arts, and to create a total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) integrating painting, design, architecture, and craft.

The Secession building (designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich, completed 1898) bore the inscription over its entrance: “Der Zeit ihre Kunst. Der Kunst ihre Freiheit” — “To every age its art. To art its freedom.” This motto is the most specific statement of the Secession’s programme: each historical period must develop its own artistic language rather than imitating the past, and art must be free from the constraints of academic convention and official taste. The Secession’s most famous collective achievement: the Beethoven Exhibition of 1902, for which Klimt created the Beethoven Frieze — a monumental painted frieze on the theme of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and the longing for happiness, which is now permanently installed in the Secession building.

Klimt’s leadership of the Secession established him as the central figure of Viennese modernism at the turn of the century — the artistic counterpart to the simultaneous Viennese achievements of Freud (psychoanalysis), Mahler (music), Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal (literature), and the philosophical circle that would produce Wittgenstein. Klimt’s Vienna was the specific cultural crucible of the European fin de siècle. See: Art Nouveau Home Decor 2026.

Ravenna 1903: The Byzantine Gold That Changed Everything

In 1903, Klimt travelled twice to Ravenna, Italy, where he saw the early Christian and Byzantine mosaics of the 5th and 6th centuries — particularly the mosaics of the Basilica of San Vitale, including the famous mosaics of Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora with their gold-ground backgrounds. The Byzantine gold-ground mosaic technique — figures set against a flat, shimmering, non-spatial field of gold tesserae — was a revelation that transformed Klimt’s visual programme.

The specific influence of the Ravenna mosaics: the Byzantine gold ground is not a naturalistic representation of space or light; it is a flat, transcendent, otherworldly field that removes the figures from earthly space and places them in a timeless, sacred, decorative realm. The gold ground signifies divinity, eternity, and the transcendent — it is the visual language of the sacred in the Byzantine tradition. Klimt adopted this gold-ground technique for his own secular subjects: the embracing lovers of The Kiss, the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the femme fatale of Judith I are all set against flat gold grounds that remove them from naturalistic space and place them in the same timeless, transcendent, decorative realm as the Byzantine emperors and empresses. Klimt secularised the sacred Byzantine gold — applying the visual language of divine eternity to romantic love, female beauty, and the bourgeois portrait.

The specific parallel: Caravaggio also visited Ravenna (in 1603, exactly 300 years before Klimt) and was influenced by the gold-ground tradition. Both artists — the Baroque tenebrist and the Art Nouveau decorator — made the Ravenna pilgrimage and brought the Byzantine gold back into their own work. See: Caravaggio: The Ravenna Gold Programme.

The Golden Phase: 23.75-Karat Gold Leaf

Klimt’s Golden Phase (approximately 1899–1910, with the most concentrated period approximately 1903–1909, immediately following the Ravenna visits) is the period of his most celebrated work, characterised by the extensive use of real gold leaf applied directly to the canvas. The gold used was high-purity gold leaf — The Kiss specifically used 23.75-karat gold leaf (pure gold is 24 karat; 23.75-karat is gold with a tiny addition of other metals for workability, the standard high-purity gold leaf used for the finest gilding).

The technical application: Klimt applied the gold leaf in the same manner as the gold-engraving and gilding tradition his father practised — the gold leaf is laid onto a prepared adhesive ground (gold size) and burnished or left matte according to the desired surface effect. The gold in Klimt’s Golden Phase paintings is not painted gold (yellow-ochre pigment simulating gold) but real metallic gold leaf, which has the specific optical property of reflecting light differently from any pigment: it shimmers, it changes appearance as the viewer moves, it catches and throws light in a way that no painted simulation can achieve. This is the specific reason that reproductions of Klimt’s gold paintings never fully capture the original: a photograph or print reproduces the gold as a yellow-ochre colour, but the original’s gold is a reflective metallic surface that behaves optically as metal, not as colour.

The Golden Phase’s major works: the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907, the “Woman in Gold”); The Kiss (1907–1908); Judith I (1901); the Beethoven Frieze (1902); and the Stoclet Frieze (1905–1911, for the Palais Stoclet in Brussels, including the Tree of Life). These are the most reproduced and most commercially dominant works of the entire Art Nouveau movement. DeckArts reproduces The Kiss, the Tree of Life (from the Stoclet Frieze), Judith I, and the later Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II. See: Klimt: The Kiss Complete Guide.

The Kiss: The Most Reproduced Romantic Image

The Kiss (Der Kuss, 1907–1908, 180 × 180 cm, Belvedere Vienna) is the most reproduced romantic image in the world and the supreme achievement of Klimt’s Golden Phase. It depicts a couple embracing at the edge of a flower-strewn meadow that ends abruptly at a precipice; the man, crowned with ivy, bends to kiss the cheek of the kneeling woman, whose face is turned up to receive the kiss, her eyes closed. The two figures are wrapped in a single ornamented gold robe that merges them into one form; the man’s portion is decorated with rectangular black-and-white motifs, the woman’s with circular floral motifs — the specific gendered ornamental coding that runs throughout Klimt’s work.

The specific quality that makes The Kiss the canonical romantic image: the merging of the two figures into a single gold form at the world’s edge, the woman’s closed eyes and turned-up face, the precipice that suggests both the danger and the transcendence of the romantic union. It is not a naturalistic depiction of a kiss; it is an allegory of romantic merging — two individuals becoming one form, removed from earthly space into the timeless gold realm, at the edge of the world. The Belvedere acquired The Kiss in 1908, directly from the exhibition where it was first shown, before it was even completed — the Austrian state purchased it immediately, recognising its significance. It has been in the Belvedere ever since and is the museum’s most famous work. See: The Kiss: Complete Guide. View The Kiss at DeckArts →

Emilie Flöge: 27 Years, “Fetch Emilie”

The most specific and most romantically resonant relationship in Klimt’s biography was with Emilie Flöge (1874–1952), his companion for approximately 27 years. Emilie was the sister of Klimt’s sister-in-law (Klimt’s brother Ernst married Emilie’s sister Helene). After Ernst Klimt’s early death in 1892, Gustav became the guardian of Ernst and Helene’s daughter, and his connection to the Flöge family deepened.

The specific nature of the Klimt-Flöge relationship is debated and was never formally documented: they were lifelong companions, but whether the relationship was romantic, sexual, platonic, or some combination is not established. Klimt had at least 14 children by various models and women (he was a notorious womaniser; his studio was full of models with whom he had sexual relationships, and paternity suits were filed against him); but Emilie Flöge occupied a unique and central position in his life that was entirely different from his relationships with his models. She was his intellectual and emotional companion, his summer holiday partner (they spent every summer together at the Attersee in the Austrian Alps, where Klimt painted his landscapes and photographed Emilie in the reform dresses she designed), and the woman to whom he wrote hundreds of postcards and letters.

Emilie had an independent professional life: she co-founded and ran the Schwestern Flöge (Flöge Sisters) fashion salon in Vienna, one of the most fashionable couture houses in the city, and designed the avant-garde “reform dresses” (loose, un-corseted garments that were the Vienna equivalent of the artistic dress reform movement). She was a successful businesswoman and designer, not merely Klimt’s companion.

Klimt suffered a stroke on 11 January 1918. According to the account that has become central to the Klimt-Flöge legend, his first words after the stroke were “Holt die Emilie” — “Fetch Emilie” / “Get Emilie.” He died on 6 February 1918. Emilie outlived him by 34 years, dying in 1952. After his death, she reportedly burned a large quantity of his letters and personal papers — the specific act that has made the true nature of their 27-year relationship permanently unknowable. She preserved his memory and his legacy but destroyed the documentary record of their private connection. The most famous romantic painter in Western history died calling her name, and she burned the evidence of what they were to each other. See: Wall Art for Couples 2026.

Adele Bloch-Bauer: The $135 Million Portrait and the Nazi Theft

The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907, the “Woman in Gold”) is the supreme achievement of Klimt’s gold portraiture and the subject of one of the most famous art restitution cases in history. Adele Bloch-Bauer (1881–1925) was the wife of the wealthy Jewish industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer; she was a Viennese society hostess and the only person Klimt painted twice (the gold Portrait I of 1907 and the colour-field Portrait II of 1912 — the latter reproduced by DeckArts). Adele died of meningitis in 1925, aged 43; in her will, she expressed the wish that her husband donate the Klimt paintings to the Austrian state gallery after his death.

The Nazi theft: after the Anschluss (the German annexation of Austria in 1938), Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, as a Jew, was forced to flee Austria; his property, including the Klimt paintings, was seized by the Nazis. The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I was taken by the Nazi regime and, after the war, was retained by the Austrian state gallery (the Belvedere), which displayed it as a national treasure — the “Woman in Gold” — for decades, on the disputed basis of Adele’s will.

The restitution: Maria Altmann, Adele Bloch-Bauer’s niece (Ferdinand’s niece by marriage), who had fled to the United States, fought a decade-long legal battle (from approximately 1998) to recover the paintings, arguing that Adele’s will did not constitute a legal bequest (Adele did not own the paintings; her husband did) and that the paintings had been stolen by the Nazis. The case went to the US Supreme Court (Republic of Austria v. Altmann, 2004) and was finally resolved by an Austrian arbitration panel in 2006, which ruled in Altmann’s favour. The five Klimt paintings were returned to Maria Altmann, who was 89 years old at the time of the return. The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I was sold in 2006 to Ronald Lauder for the Neue Galerie in New York for $135 million — at the time, the highest price ever paid for a painting. The story was dramatised in the 2015 film Woman in Gold (Helen Mirren as Maria Altmann). See: Klimt: Adele Bloch-Bauer Complete Guide. View Adele II at DeckArts →

Scandal: The University Paintings and the Censorship

The most specific establishment scandal of Klimt’s career: the University of Vienna ceiling paintings (the “Faculty Paintings”). In 1894, Klimt was commissioned to paint three large ceiling paintings for the Great Hall of the University of Vienna, representing the faculties of Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence. The expectation was conventional academic allegory celebrating the triumph of reason, science, and law.

What Klimt produced (between approximately 1900 and 1907) was the opposite: dark, ambiguous, sexually explicit, and pessimistic allegories that depicted philosophy, medicine, and law not as triumphant rational achievements but as overwhelming, irrational, mortal, and erotic forces. The paintings depicted naked figures, sexual imagery, suffering, and death in a way that scandalised the conservative Austrian academic and political establishment. The Philosophy painting was attacked by 87 professors of the University, who petitioned against it; the paintings were condemned as pornographic and as an affront to the dignity of the institutions they were meant to celebrate.

Klimt, furious at the rejection, withdrew from the commission, returned his fee (with the financial help of his patron August Lederer), and kept the paintings. The specific tragic coda: the three Faculty Paintings, which were among Klimt’s most ambitious and most personally significant works, were destroyed in 1945 when retreating SS forces set fire to Schloss Immendorf, the castle where they had been stored for safekeeping during the war. The University Paintings survive only in black-and-white photographs and preparatory studies. The most scandalous and most ambitious works of Klimt’s career were burned by the SS in the final days of the war.

Death in 1918: The Year Vienna Ended

Klimt suffered a stroke on 11 January 1918, which left him partially paralysed. He was subsequently weakened and contracted pneumonia (in the context of the 1918 influenza pandemic that was beginning to sweep Europe). He died on 6 February 1918 in Vienna, aged 55.

The specific historical timing of Klimt’s death: 1918 was the year the world of imperial Vienna ended. The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed at the end of the First World War in November 1918; the Vienna that had been the cultural capital of Central Europe, the Vienna of Klimt, Freud, Mahler, and the fin de siècle, ceased to exist as an imperial centre. Klimt died at the beginning of the year the empire ended. Two other major figures of Viennese modernism died in the same year, 1918: the architect Otto Wagner and the painter Egon Schiele (Klimt’s protégé, who died in the influenza pandemic at age 28, three days after his pregnant wife). The year 1918 saw the death of imperial Vienna and the deaths of three of its greatest artistic figures. Klimt left numerous works unfinished in his studio at his death. See: Klimt: The Kiss Complete Guide.

Klimt for Home Decor

Klimt’s work in the DeckArts range — The Kiss, the Tree of Life, Judith I, and the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II — is the most specifically gold-and-navy appropriate classical art in the range, and the most romantically and decoratively beautiful. The specific home decor programme for Klimt’s gold work:

On navy (the canonical Klimt installation): The gold of Klimt’s Golden Phase advances from navy dark at maximum warm-cool contrast, reproducing the specific optical condition of the Byzantine gold-ground tradition: gold figures advancing from a dark, timeless, non-spatial ground. The Kiss on navy above the bedroom bed; the Tree of Life on navy above the primary sofa; Judith I on navy or forest green. The navy provides the dark, transcendent ground from which Klimt’s gold emerges — the same condition as the Ravenna mosaics under candlelight that inspired the whole programme. See: Navy Blue Room Wall Art 2026.

Under 2700K warm LED (mandatory): The warm directed light activates Klimt’s gold at maximum reflectance — the warm 2700K light is the closest domestic equivalent to the candlelight and oil-lamp light under which the Byzantine gold mosaics were originally seen. Klimt’s gold under warm directed light: the shimmering, reflective metallic quality that no reproduction captures, restored to the domestic wall.

Best positions: The Kiss above the bedroom bed (navy, the romantic primary); the Tree of Life above the primary sofa (navy, the cosmic axis mundi); Judith I above the desk or in the dark library (forest green or navy, the femme fatale power); the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II above the dressing area or in the living room (navy or warm white, the colour-field portrait). View Tree of Life →

Four Complete Klimt Programmes

Programme 1: The Kiss Bedroom (~$140)
Navy above-bed feature wall + The Kiss single (~$140) at 165–175 cm (safety wire) + warm cream linen + 2700K bedside lamps + directed 2700K art spot. The 23.75-karat gold from navy dark. “27 years with Emilie. Last words: ‘Fetch Emilie.’ She burned the letters.” Total art: ~$140.

Programme 2: The Tree of Life Living Room (~$310)
Navy primary sofa wall + Tree of Life triptych (~$310) at 155–165 cm (from the Stoclet Frieze, Brussels; gold spirals from navy dark) + warm cream sofa + brass accents + directed 2700K track spot. The cosmic axis mundi above the gathering space. Total art: ~$310. See: Klimt: Tree of Life Guide.

Programme 3: The Golden Phase Gallery (~$590)
Navy primary wall + The Kiss single (~$140) + Tree of Life triptych (~$310) + Judith I single (~$140) in a gallery arrangement. Three Golden Phase programmes: the romantic merging + the cosmic tree + the femme fatale power. Total art: ~$590. The most complete Klimt Golden Phase domestic programme.

Programme 4: The Two Klimt Women (~$280)
Navy or warm white walls + Judith I single (~$140, forest green or navy, the femme fatale; gold collar; Belvedere Vienna) + Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II single (~$140, the colour-field portrait; $87.9 million; Nazi theft; restituted to Maria Altmann 2006). Two Klimt portraits of women: the mythological femme fatale + the bourgeois society hostess whose portrait was stolen by the Nazis. Total art: ~$280. See: Klimt: Adele Bloch-Bauer Complete Guide.

FAQ

Who was Gustav Klimt?

Gustav Klimt (14 July 1862 – 6 February 1918): Austrian painter; founder and first president of the Vienna Secession (1897); the central figure of Viennese modernism and the Art Nouveau movement. Son of a gold engraver (the biographical source of his Golden Phase). Inspired by the Byzantine gold-ground mosaics he saw in Ravenna in 1903, he developed his Golden Phase (c.1903–1909), using real 23.75-karat gold leaf in works including The Kiss (1907–1908), the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), Judith I (1901), and the Tree of Life (Stoclet Frieze, 1905–1911). He had at least 14 children by various models, never married, and lived with his mother until her death; his 27-year companion was Emilie Flöge, whose name was his dying word after his stroke. He died on 6 February 1918, aged 55, at the beginning of the year imperial Vienna ended. At the Belvedere, Vienna. DeckArts Klimt from ~$140.

What is Klimt’s gold made of?

Real metallic gold leaf — The Kiss specifically used 23.75-karat gold leaf (pure gold is 24 karat; 23.75-karat is high-purity gold with a tiny addition of other metals for workability, the standard for the finest gilding). Klimt grew up in a gold-engraver’s household (his father Ernst was a goldsmith) and applied gold leaf in the same material tradition. The gold is not painted (yellow-ochre pigment simulating gold) but real metallic gold leaf laid onto an adhesive ground, which reflects light as metal — shimmering and changing appearance as the viewer moves. This is why reproductions never fully capture Klimt’s gold: a print reproduces it as a yellow colour, but the original is a reflective metallic surface. Klimt was inspired to use gold by the Byzantine gold-ground mosaics he saw in Ravenna in 1903. DeckArts Klimt from ~$140. See: Klimt: The Kiss Complete Guide.

Article Summary

Gustav Klimt (14 July 1862 – 6 February 1918) is the most commercially dominant and most romantically iconic artist of the Vienna Secession and Art Nouveau. Eight specific biographical facts: (1) Son of a gold engraver — the biographical source of his Golden Phase; trained as an architectural decorative painter; received the Golden Order of Merit from Emperor Franz Joseph in 1888; (2) Founded the Vienna Secession in 1897 (motto: “To every age its art. To art its freedom”); created the Beethoven Frieze (1902); (3) Visited Ravenna in 1903 and was transformed by the Byzantine gold-ground mosaics — secularising the sacred gold for romantic and bourgeois subjects (300 years after Caravaggio made the same pilgrimage); (4) The Golden Phase used real 23.75-karat gold leaf; (5) The Kiss (1907–1908, Belvedere) is the most reproduced romantic image in the world, acquired by the Austrian state before completion; (6) His 27-year companion Emilie Flöge (an independent fashion designer) received his dying words “Fetch Emilie” after his 1918 stroke; she burned his letters; he had at least 14 children by various models and never married; (7) The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (“Woman in Gold”) was stolen by the Nazis, recovered by Maria Altmann in a decade-long legal battle, and sold for $135 million in 2006; (8) The University Faculty Paintings were condemned as pornographic and were burned by retreating SS forces in 1945; he died at the beginning of 1918, the year imperial Vienna ended. DeckArts Klimt: The Kiss, Tree of Life, Judith I, Adele II — from ~$140, on navy under 2700K warm LED. Ships from Berlin. 30-day return.

About the Author

Stanislav Arnautov is the founder of DeckArts and a creative director from Ukraine based in Berlin.

Related Guides

• Klimt: The Kiss Complete Guide
• Klimt: Adele Bloch-Bauer, Woman in Gold
• Art Nouveau Home Decor 2026
• Navy Blue Room Wall Art 2026
• Wall Art for Couples 2026