Gustav Klimt

In 1897 Klimt co-founded the Vienna Secession alongside artists including Koloman Moser and Carl Moll, becoming its first president. The group's journal, Ver Sacrum, gave the movement a public voice, and Klimt's own contributions helped define the decorative strand of Art Nouveau - or Jugendstil - across Europe. The rupture with official taste came swiftly. Three ceiling paintings commissioned by the University of Vienna - Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence - provoked charges of pornography and moral excess. Eighty-seven professors signed a petition against their installation. Klimt withdrew the works, repaid the commission, and declared he would accept no further state projects. The paintings were later destroyed by retreating German forces in 1945.

Freed from institutional constraints, Klimt developed the approach now most closely identified with his name. Visits to Venice and Ravenna - cities saturated with Byzantine gold mosaic - fed what critics came to call the Golden Phase. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907) and The Kiss (1907-08) use gold and silver leaf embedded in elaborate patterned surfaces to dissolve the boundary between figure and ornament. The female body remained his central subject throughout, explored also in an enormous output of drawings - executed in black chalk, pencil, and colored pencil - that record his models in postures ranging from academic study to frank eroticism. His drawing practice was prolific and technically assured; the critic Hans Tietze described his line as possessing "incomprehensible ease."

In 1902 Klimt completed the Beethoven Frieze for the fourteenth Secessionist exhibition, a monumental work in casein paint, gold, semi-precious stones, and other mixed media that synthesized the group's Gesamtkunstwerk ambitions. He exhibited at the Venice Biennale, received a gold medal at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris for Philosophy, and became a central figure in the intellectual and social circle gathered around Emilie Floge, his companion and creative interlocutor. He suffered a stroke in January 1918 and died on 6 February 1918 of pneumonia, at the age of 55.

Klimt's market position today reflects both the scarcity of his finished paintings - fewer than 250 survive - and the dramatic restitution story attached to the Bloch-Bauer works, which were looted by the Nazi regime and eventually returned to their rightful heirs. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I sold privately to Ronald Lauder for $135 million in 2006; Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II fetched $87.9 million at Christie's the same year. On Auctionist, Klimt appears across 17 items concentrated in drawings and works on paper, sold primarily through im Kinsky and Dorotheum Vienna - the two Viennese houses best placed to handle his estate material. The top result recorded on the platform is a drawing of Adele Bloch-Bauer with hat, sold for 65,000 EUR.