When Gustav Klimt died in February 1918, the Spanish flu took him at fifty-five. In his studio, among the half-finished canvases and gold leaf, investigators found thousands of drawings \u2014 the overwhelming majority of them nudes. Women, mostly. Reclining. Standing. Masturbating. Sleeping. Pregnant. Old. Young. The drawings were not preparatory studies for paintings. They were the paintings’ secret twin: a private, obsessive, lifelong investigation of the naked body conducted in parallel with the public career of gilt and ornament that made him Vienna’s most celebrated \u2014 and most scandalous \u2014 artist.
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Klimt was born on this day in 1862, in Baumgarten, then a suburb of Vienna. He trained in architectural painting at the Kunstgewerbeschule and made his early reputation with his brother Ernst on decorative commissions \u2014 theater ceilings, museum staircases, the kind of work that made you a successful craftsman but not an artist. By the 1890s, Klimt had outgrown it. In 1897 he co-founded the Vienna Secession, breaking with the academic establishment to pursue a new vision of art: decorative, symbolic, unapologetically erotic, and obsessed with the female body.
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What happened next would define the rest of his career \u2014 and, in a sense, define the nude in modernism. In 1900, Klimt unveiled Philosophy, the first of three ceiling paintings commissioned for the University of Vienna’s Great Hall. It showed naked, intertwined bodies drifting through a cosmic void \u2014 no classical ideal, no allegorical distance. Just flesh, darkness, and ambiguity. The professors were horrified. Eighty-seven of them signed a petition demanding the paintings be removed. Klimt responded by buying back the commission with his own money, returning the advance, and declaring: “I am convinced that I am not the right man for the job.” He never took another public commission. The three paintings \u2014 Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence \u2014 were destroyed by retreating SS forces in 1945, surviving now only in black-and-white photographs and preparatory studies.
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The University scandal did something crucial to Klimt: it freed him. Liberated from public expectations, he turned inward. The next decade produced the golden phase: Judith I (1901), The Kiss (1907-1908), Dana\u00eb (1907), and scores of erotic drawings that moved further and further from academic convention. In Dana\u00eb, the mythological princess who receives Zeus as a shower of gold is depicted curled into a fetal ball, eyes closed, lips parted, gold coins streaming between her thighs. There is no allegorical distance here \u2014 the painting is the orgasm. Critics at the time called it pornographic. Today it hangs in the Leopold Museum as a masterpiece of early modernism.
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But the drawings are where Klimt’s relationship to the nude body becomes most radical. Unlike his painted nudes \u2014 which are always embedded in ornament, gold, pattern, myth \u2014 the drawings are stripped bare. Line on paper, nothing else. He drew women masturbating with the same unembarrassed attention he gave to drapery studies. His models were often drawn from Vienna’s working class and demi-monde \u2014 women who, in the drawings, seem utterly at ease, inhabiting their own bodies without performance. The gaze in these works is not voyeuristic so much as phenomenological: Klimt isn’t watching from outside, he’s trying to understand what the body feels like from inside.
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There’s a famous story from the late years. A visitor to Klimt’s studio asked why he never painted self-portraits. “I am less interesting than my work,” Klimt replied. “I am a painter who paints day after day from morning till night. Whoever wants to know something about me should look attentively at my pictures.” It’s a dodge, but it’s also the truth. Klimt poured everything into the body \u2014 not his body, but the bodies of others. The thousands of nude drawings are the autobiography he refused to write any other way.
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Klimt also drew what other artists avoided: the pregnant nude, the aging nude, the nude that has no mythological alibi and no erotic payoff. His study of an old woman clenching her fists \u2014 drawn around 1901, contemporaneous with the golden Judith \u2014 shows a gaunt, furious body that has been used and discarded. It is, in its way, as radical as Dana\u00eb \u2014 perhaps more so, because there is no gold to hide behind.
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When the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, they confiscated Klimt’s work from Jewish collectors. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I \u2014 the “Woman in Gold” \u2014 spent six decades in the Belvedere before Maria Altmann, Bloch-Bauer’s niece, won its restitution in 2006. The legal battle became a film. But the restitution fight was never just about one painting. It was about what Klimt’s art represented: a Vienna that was Jewish, cosmopolitan, sexually unafraid. The nudes were always the scandal, but they were also always the truth \u2014 that the body is not a thing to be hidden or idealized, but a thing to be lived in, looked at, and eventually surrendered.
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Klimt made the nude body a surface worthy of gold. Then he spent thirty years proving it didn’t need the gold at all.
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Gustav Klimt died on February 6, 1918, in Vienna. All works referenced are in the public domain.