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Gustav Klimt's father was a gold engraver in Vienna, and the trade never left the son. In the years around 1908 Klimt worked in what people now call his golden phase, pressing thin sheets of real gold leaf into his paintings the way a medieval icon-maker would, so that a canvas like The Kiss glows when the light moves across it. Two lovers kneel wrapped in a single gold cloak, the man's robe patterned in hard rectangles and the woman's in soft circles, the whole thing balanced at the edge of a flowered cliff.

By then Klimt was the most famous and most argued-over artist in the city. In 1897 he and a group of younger artists walked out of Vienna's conservative art establishment to found the Secession, a breakaway society with its own building and a motto about giving each age its own art. Klimt was its first president. When he was commissioned to paint ceiling panels for the University of Vienna, the faculty were so disturbed by the raw, sexual, pessimistic images he delivered that they refused to hang them, and he bought the works back rather than change them.

He was born in 1862, the second of seven children in a household often short of money. He rarely explained his pictures, gave almost no interviews, and left a great deal of erotic drawing behind him. He died in Vienna in early 1918 after a stroke, and left several canvases unfinished on his easel.