Gustav Klimt (Baumgarten, July 14, 1862-Alsergrund, February 6, 1918) was an Austrian Symbolist painter, and one of the most conspicuous representatives of the modernist movement of the Viennese secession. Klimt painted canvases and murals with a highly ornate personal style, which he also expressed through craft objects, such as those gathered in the Vienna Secession Gallery. Intellectually related to a certain romantic ideology, Klimt found in the female nude one of his most recurrent sources of inspiration. His works are endowed with an intense sensual energy, reflected with special clarity in his numerous notes and pencil sketches, in a certain way heirs to the tradition of erotic drawings by Rodin and Ingres.

Early in his artistic career, he was a successful painter of architectural decorations in a conventional manner. When he began to develop a more personal style, his work was the subject of controversy that culminated when the paintings he made around 1900 for the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna were criticized as pornographic. He subsequently accepted no further public commissions, but achieved new success with the paintings of his "golden phase", many of which included gold leaf. Klimt's work was an important influence on his younger companion, Egon Schiele.

Klimt's work has been identified with the sumptuous decoration based on gilding and brightly colored ornamental elements, but also with hidden phallic shapes that indicate the character of the drawings from which they were inspired. In the first version of Judith, for example, but also in The Kiss and, above all, in the Danae of 1907 , abstract elements of an unmistakable sexual nature appear . Since women are one of Klimt's most recurrent themes, it is logical that the artist represented many of the facets of the female character, although he had a special predilection for an aggressive and dominant type of woman who could be identified with the iconic model of the femme fatale.

Art historians agree in pointing out the eclectic nature of his pictorial style; and references to the art of ancient Egypt, Mycenaean culture, classical Greece and Byzantine art have been noted, among others. A man of classical training, Klimt nevertheless felt no qualms about expressing his enthusiasm for the art of medieval artists - such as Dürer - or exotic artists - such as the artists of the Japanese Rinpa school. His mature works are characterized by a rejection of his naturalistic beginnings, thus pointing out the progressive development of symbolic or abstract motifs that emphasized the freedom of spirit that permeated all the artistic avant-garde of the early 20th century.

Likewise, the value of the line in his work is significant. His dramatic compositions—sometimes using strange points of view, vertical planes, and atypical cuts—underline the innovative nature of his art, and anticipate the expressive value of the line that would characterize later expressionism.