Der Kuss - Liebespaar

Gustav Klimt was an Austrian painter, most famous representative of the Viennese Art Nouveau and founding president of the Vienna Secession. Klimt was the son of Ernst Klimt, a gold engraver from Bohemia, and Anna Rosalia Klimt. He was born the second of seven children, his brothers Ernst Klimt and Georg Klimt were also artists.

Klimt was initially supposed to learn his father's trade, but he received a scholarship and studied from 1876 to 1883 at the Vienna School of Applied Arts of the Imperial and Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry. In 1880, together with his brother Ernst and Franz Matsch, he formed a studio community run as an artist company and created, among other things, curtain and ceiling paintings for theaters in Reichenberg, Karlovy Vary.

On May 24, 1897, he resigned from the Künstlerhaus and was one of the founders of the Vienna Secession, of which he was the first president from 1897 to 1899. In 1905 Klimt and a group of artists resigned from the Secession because some of his fellow painters were pursuing a style that was too "naturalistic" for him. Klimt's paintings were removed from the Secession building, and that same year Klimt became a member of the Deutscher Künstlerbund. From 1908 to1909 Klimt painted his most famous painting, The Kiss - Lovers. The painting Der Kuss was presented at the Kunstschau Wien 1908 and was bought by the k.k. Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs.

In 1912 Klimt became president of the Association of Austrian Artists. From 1900 to 1916 Gustav Klimt was mainly at the Attersee in Upper Austria, mainly visiting the villa of the court carpenter Friedrich Paulick and there he created most of his landscape paintings.

On February 6, 1918 Gustav Klimt died in Vienna, 9th district, Austria.