Art by Gustav Klimt

Klimt's "Golden Phase," starting around 1898, is what most people picture when they hear his name: dense fields of gold leaf wrapped around flattened, ornamental figures, a style he developed directly after seeing Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna. The Kiss and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I both come out of this period. He ran his studio in a long caftan with nothing underneath it, kept several cats around and reportedly used their urine as a fixative for his drawings, and never married, though he's believed to have fathered as many as 14 children outside of marriage.

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I became famous twice over: once as a painting, and again as the subject of a long restitution battle after the Nazis seized it from the Bloch-Bauer family, a case later dramatized in the film Woman in Gold. In November 2025, a different Klimt portrait, of Adele's niece Elisabeth Lederer, sold at Sotheby's for $236.4 million, the highest price ever paid for a modern artwork at auction and the second-highest for any painting, behind only the disputed Leonardo Salvator Mundi. Elisabeth had reportedly used the portrait during the Nazi era to help argue that Klimt, not her Jewish father, was her biological parent, a claim that likely helped her survive in Vienna until 1944.