The Klimt trail in Vienna: following the painter through his city
Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) is the most famous painter associated with Vienna, but his relationship to the city was complicated. He was born in Baumgarten (now the 14th district), grew up in poverty, trained at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, and spent his entire career in a city that alternated between celebrating and scandalising him. His work was called pornographic by the Vienna University Senate; his three University Paintings were condemned by the Austrian Ministry of Education. He never taught, held no academic position, refused state honours. He lived with twelve cats, allegedly fathered 14 children, walked to his studio every day, and died in February 1918 of a stroke, having said almost nothing quotable about his own work.
His paintings are in Vienna. Here is where.
The Belvedere: the essential address
The Upper Belvedere (Prinz-Eugen-Strasse 27, 3rd district) has the most important Klimt collection in the world. The Kiss (1908), Judith I (1901), and seven other major works are in the permanent collection.
I arrived at 9:05 on a Tuesday in June, before the coaches. The room with “The Kiss” (Room 8, first floor) had two other visitors. This matters because “The Kiss” — 180 × 180 cm, oil and gold leaf — is a painting that rewards examination without competition for space. The gold-leaf patterning (the man’s costume in geometric squares, the woman’s in rounded flower shapes — a distinction of gender coded into the surface texture) takes several minutes to see properly. The cliff edge the two figures are apparently perched on. The woman’s slightly sideways turned head, suggesting either bliss or reluctance. The way the gold dominates and the faces and hands are the only naturalistic elements.
The Vienna: Belvedere and The Best of Gustav Klimt private tour gives the Belvedere’s Klimt collection the depth it merits — the private guide explains the symbolism in Judith I (the Jewish widow who seduces and beheads the Assyrian general Holofernes, here shown in the erotic haze of post-execution, the severed head visible at the painting’s edge), the relationship between Klimt’s golden period and the Byzantine mosaics he studied in Ravenna.
Admission: Online booking is helpful for the time slot. See our Belvedere Klimt tour review for the options.
The Secession Building: the founding manifesto
The Secession Building (Friedrichstrasse 12, 1st district) was built in 1897 for Klimt’s group of artists who broke from the conservative Vienna Artists’ House — the Vienna Secession, founding the Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) movement in Austria. The golden laurel-dome (the “golden cabbage,” as the Viennese called it, affectionately), the inscription above the door (Der Zeit ihre Kunst, der Kunst ihre Freiheit — To every age its art, to art its freedom).
The Beethoven Frieze in the basement is Klimt’s major surviving decorative work — 34 metres of frieze painted in 1902 as a response to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The panels: “The longing for happiness” (floating female figures, gnawing worm, Gorgons), “The hostile forces” (the knight in golden armour fighting the Typhon monster), “The choir of paradise” (figures in the gold-leaf style that would define his later work). Entry 6.50 €; the Frieze alone justifies it.
The Kunsthistorisches Museum: the early work
The Kunsthistorisches Museum (Maria-Theresien-Platz, 1st district) has Klimt’s early decorative work on its walls — literally. The ceiling panels and spandrel paintings in the grand staircase (1890–1891) are by the young Klimt and his studio, commissioned for the KHM’s inauguration. They show ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman art through allegorical female figures — the academic style the Secession would soon reject, but accomplished and interesting in its own right.
Look up at the staircase ceiling when you arrive. The Klimt-painted sections are on the right side of the main staircase (look at the individual panels for the signature style beginning to emerge).
The Burgtheater: the lost friezes
The Burgtheater (Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Ring 2, 1st district) has Klimt ceiling paintings in the grand staircase — the Shakespeare Theatre in London (with portraits of the Globe’s first audience, including Shakespeare himself), the Altar of Dionysus, and the ancient Greek theatre at Taormina. These were commissioned in 1886–1888 when Klimt was still working in the academic tradition. Entry to the Burgtheater for guided tours includes the staircase.
What was lost: Klimt’s three University Paintings — Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence — were the most ambitious and the most controversial works of his career (1900–1907). All three were destroyed by fire at Schloss Immendorf in May 1945, when retreating SS troops burned the castle where they had been stored for safekeeping from Allied bombing. What remains: historical photographs, preparatory sketches. The loss is one of the great cultural tragedies of the 20th century.
What Vienna keeps of Klimt
Beyond the major works: the Leopold Museum (MuseumsQuartier, 7th district) has Klimt drawings and studies in its collection alongside the world’s largest Schiele collection. The Wien Museum (Karlsplatz 8) has Klimt’s portrait of Sonja Knips (1898) — one of his finest early works, the iridescent dress already suggesting the direction he would take.
The Klimt Villa (Feldmühlgasse 11, 13th district) — the studio house in Hietzing where Klimt worked from 1911 until his death. Open to visitors Tuesday–Sunday in the warmer months. The garden studio is intact; the sketching tables, the material used in his collage works, the model stand. A place where work was made rather than admired.
Vienna keeps Klimt’s most important work, but what it does not keep — the University Paintings, the drawings he made in the last decade and distributed casually — reminds you that the archive of any artist’s life is always incomplete, always a negotiation between what survived and what the world decided to preserve. The Belvedere and the Secession are the essential addresses. What those walls contain is what is left.