Gilt-edged

How Austrian painter Gustav Klimt set the course for 20th-century art

"Whoever wants to know something about me," Austrian painter Gustav Klimt once said, "ought to look carefully at my pictures and try to see in them what I am and what I want to do." And what a lot that was. Klimt lived in a late 19th-and early-20th-century Vienna that was intensely bohemian, awash with wild decadence and artistic experimentation - an avant-garde collective of artists and intellectuals that comprised architect Otto Wagner, composers Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schonberg and the psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud.

From such heady cultural company emerged Klimt. Born in 1862 in Vienna to a father who was a gilder, Klimt grew up with the luster of gold and silver around him, and was highly entrepreneurial. By the age of 14, he enrolled in Vienna's School of Applied Arts, where he studied fresco painting. His trademark was copying iconic paintings like Isabelle d'Este by Titian. Klimt sold portraits he painted from photographs and made technical drawings for an ear specialist - hence, his interest in, and mastery of the human form.