Gustav Klimt, a modernist master

A painting that had vanished in 1997 was discovered in the walls of the very gallery it was stolen from in 2019. The painting's disappearance had been one of the art world's biggest mysteries. "Portrait of a Lady" is a later work by the Austrian art nouveau master.

The last piece Austrian artist Gustav Klimt ever painted — "Lady with a Fan" — was still on his easel at the time of his death at the onset of the flu pandemic in 1918. Sotheby's has described the portrait as "the most valuable ever to have been offered at auction in Europe."

Fourteen-year-old Gustav Klimt entered the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts in 1876, and perfected the classical style of painting. He was a gifted draftsman able to depict details with photo-like precision. As a portraitist he captured the soul of the sitter.

Among his first commissions were the murals of Vienna's Burgtheater. In 1886, working as the group called the "Company of Artists," Gustav Klimt, his brother Ernst Klimt and Franz Matsch painted emblematic scenes of theater history on the staircase hall and ceiling of the building. In 1888, Emperor Franz Joseph bestowed them with the Golden Cross of Merit.

In 1887 Klimt became the first president of the Vienna Secession movement. The group of artists — among them the renowned architect Joseph Hoffmann — aimed to create a new style that broke away from tradition and democratized art. The arts were to unite to bring beauty into everyday life.

In 1894 Klimt was asked to paint three murals for the ceiling of the University of Vienna. Instead of painting historical allegories of medicine, philosophy and jurisprudence, the artist broke away from tradition and created dream-like scenes of sensuous nudes floating in a void. The painting above represents Medicine. All three works burned in the fire of Immendorf Castle in 1945.

His representation of Philosophy shows the victory of light over darkness. Klimt painted nude figures that pile up on the left edge of the canvas because of the lack of depth; a characteristic of modern art. They float through life and contort in despair with their eyes closed. Knowledge, at the bottom of the work, has her's wide open.

Klimt's famous golden period begins with the "Beethoven Frieze" and reaches its peek with "The Kiss" and "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" (shown here). The latter is inspired by the Byzantine mosaic of Empress Theodora (A.D. 547) in the Church of San Vitale. Stolen by the Nazis in 1941, the painting was returned to the Bloch-Bauer heirs in 2006 and sold for a record sum that same year.

Flatness creeps into modern art to emphasize the characteristics and materials of the medium. Art shows its truth instead of creating an optical illusion. By adding gold to his paintings, Klimt wrapped his figures around in an aura of spirituality. This period is characterized by a mixture of expressionism and rich ornamentation.

Klimt studied the human form through hundreds of sketches. He drew mostly women of different shapes, and ages in multiple poses. His sensuous lines dig into the soul of the model, and have a similar effect to literature's stream of consciousness. Through form stripped to its bare minimum, Klimt opens a window into the human psyche.

Even though the subject of life and death has been depicted many times throughout history, Klimt managed to make it modern. In "Death and Life," death looks menacingly towards the stream of the living who float in a dream of color. As many artists of his time, Klimt has a particular interest in the inner world.