Explores the turn-of-the-century Viennese painter's life and work, highlights the utopian Secession movement of which Klimt was a leader, and reproduces the artist's paintings, sketches, and correspondence.

"Gustav Klimt's beautiful, ornamental, and often gilded paintings, as well as his remarkable depictions of women, have made him world famous. The milieu and achievements of this remarkable artist are portrayed through handsome color reproductions and a comprehensive text. This volume is a tribute to an artist who continues to engage, surprise, and fascinate us."--Amazon.

In Vienna at the end of the 19th century, the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire witnessed a surge of unprecedented creativity in the fields of painting, music, literature and architecture. Gustav Klimt ranks as one of the foremost figures of this period and in 1897, the Vienna Sezession, the movement of which he was president, brought together a group of artists dedicated to promoting modern art. Klimt's involvement with the Sezession and the scandals provoked by his symbolic paintings shook European intellectual society, for Klimt was a painter to the Viennese upper classes. His portraits of women are among the most sensual representations of the female form in the history of art.

Gustav Klimt's art thoroughly expresses the apocalyptic atmosphere of Vienna's upper middle-class society - a society devoted to the cultivation of aesthetic awareness and the cult of pleasure. The ecstatic joy which Klimt and his contemporaries found - or hoped to find - in beauty was constantly overshadowed by death. And death therefore plays an important role in Klimt's art. Klimt's fame, however, rests on his reputation as one of the greatest erotic painters and graphic artists of his times. In particular, his drawings, which have been widely admired for their artistic excellence, are dominated by the erotic portrayal of women. Klimt saw the world "in female form". [site accessed 23/07/2012 - http://www.amazon.com/Gustav-Klimt-1862-1918-Basic-Art/dp/382285980X].

"Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) remains one of the most popular artists of the early 20th century. Published to accompany a major exhibition at Tate Liverpool, a highlight of that city's 2008 Capital of Culture celebrations and the first such show in the UK, Gustav Klimt explores the life and work of an intriguing figure at the heart of the cultural transformation of Vienna around 1900." "Central to the book is the first thorough examination of the relationship between Klimt's paintings and the work of his close friend the architect and designer Josef Hoffmann. Reaching beyond the two-dimensional arts, it hails the advent of an all-inclusive design culture that embraced interiors, furniture, clothing and jewellery. Essays by leading scholars and curators consider key works, events and developments: the founding of the Viennese Secession, the inaugural display of the Beethoven Frieze, and a series of collaborative ventures in the creation of total domestic environments for the pursuit of 'modern life', among them the Villa Waerndorfer in Vienna and the Villa Primavesi in rural northern Moravia. In addition, Klimt is assessed as both an accomplished erotic draughtsman and a seductive landscape painter."--BOOK JACKET.