Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt was born in Vienna on 14 July 1862 and started as a reliable decorator of ceilings and walls, conventional and paid. Around 1900 his murals for the University of Vienna's Great Hall were denounced as pornographic, and he walked away from public commissions for good. What followed was his "golden phase" - paintings shimmering with actual gold leaf, most often mapping the female body with a frankness that marked everything he made. He co-founded the Vienna Secession, pulled heavily from Japanese art, and painted landscapes between the allegories and portraits. The Kiss and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I became his best-known works; the latter would later break auction records. He died on 6 February 1918 after a stroke and pneumonia, leaving a younger generation - Egon Schiele among them - shaped by what he'd dared.