Gustav Klimt

📍Baumgarten, 1140 Vienna, Austria

“I was born Gustav Klimt on the 14th of July 1862 in Baumgarten, a suburb of Vienna, the son of Ernst Klimt, a gold engraver. My father's craft — the precise working of precious metal — entered my painting: the gold leaf, the decorative surfaces, the treatment of the female body as both subject and ornament. Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century was the most neurotic and brilliant city in the world — Freud and Mahler and Schnitzler were my contemporaries — and the Viennese Secession that I helped found was our collective rejection of the academic tradition. The Kiss was painted in Vienna in 1907-8 and remains there in the Belvedere, the city's most beloved object.”

Sources: Comini, A. Gustav Klimt (1975), Braziller; Fliedl, G. Gustav Klimt (1992, translated Hugh Beyer), Taschen