About Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt (14 July 1862 – 6 February 1918) was an Austrian Symbolist painter and a founding member of the Vienna Secession movement.
His work helped define the Art Nouveau style in Europe.
Born in Vienna into a lower middle-class family, his father Ernst worked as an engraver and goldsmith — a craft that would leave an unmistakable imprint on his son's aesthetic.
In 1876, Klimt earned a scholarship to the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, where he studied until 1883 and received training as an architectural painter.
His early work had a classical style typical of late 19th-century academic painting, as seen in his murals for the Vienna Burgtheater (1888) and on the staircase of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. That conventional success, however, proved to be a point of departure rather than a destination. In 1897, Klimt and a group of like-minded artists resigned from the Vienna Artists' Association and founded the Vienna Secession — a decisive break that freed him to pursue a radically personal visual language. Life, love, and death can be determined as the important themes of Klimt's work, pursued through roughly one large-format portrait of a woman per year, rendered in the Art Nouveau principles of flatness, decoration, and gold leaf, alongside allegories and Old Testament heroines transformed into dangerous femmes fatales.
During the early years of the Secessionist movement, Klimt began incorporating gold leaf into his paintings — the development that would define his so-called "Golden Phase," with *Pallas Athena* (1898) often considered its earliest example and *Judith I* (1901) another notable milestone.
In 1903, Klimt traveled to Ravenna, where he admired the Byzantine mosaics of the Basilica San Vitale — an influence unmistakable in the height of his Golden Phase, including *Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I* (1907) and *The Kiss* (1907–08).
*The Kiss* — depicting a man and woman locked in an embrace, created using oil paint and silver, gold, and platinum leaf to produce a shimmering, mosaic effect — is now held in
About this work
All authoritative sources — the Neue Pinakothek (its holding institution), Google Arts & Culture, WikiArt, and Artchive — date Klimt's *Music* to **1895**, not 1901. The "1901" in the product title likely refers to the year the Neue Pinakothek acquired it at the Glaspalast exhibition in Munich. The painting itself was made in 1895. The description below reflects the correct date and notes the 1901 acquisition.
At the center of *Music* stands a woman in a dark, flowing dress cradling a golden lyre, set against a background of deep blues and greens woven through with swirling ornate patterns and pale floral motifs.
Contrast is the painting's governing compositional principle — nowhere more sharply felt than in the tension between the figure's shadowed dress and the luminous brightness of the instrument she holds.
The densely patterned space surrounding the player — its markings resembling scattered notes — pulls against a deliberate emptiness elsewhere in the composition, while flanking stone figures of the Silenus mask and the Sphinx anchor the scene in classical mythology.
The lyre symbolises music itself; the sphinx alludes to artistic freedom; the lion's teeth at the centre read as a metaphor for the spread of new ideas. Every element earns its place in a work that functions as symbolic argument as much as image.
Stylistically, *Music* is far in advance of other paintings Klimt completed that same year — it was one of his first exercises in the manner shortly to be dubbed the "Secession style."
Music was the most widely loved of the arts in Vienna at the time, a city still regarded as the musical capital of the world — the city of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Mahler. Painting allegories of sound was, for Klimt, a way of staking a claim within that culture — asserting that the visual arts belonged in the same conversation. In 1901, the work entered Munich's Neue Pinakothek, purchased directly from the artist at the Jahresausstellung in the Glaspalast — an acquisition that signalled his growing recognition well beyond Vienna.
Though among his earliest works, *Music* already displays the hallmarks of Klimt's mature manner: the flattening of pictorial space, and a palette chosen for symbolic weight rather than naturalistic description.
On a wall, *Music* rewards a room that already holds its own quiet. The painting's compact dimensions make for an intimate encounter, drawing the viewer close to examine its intricately layered surface. It suits a study, a reading room, or a music room — spaces where thought and sensory experience are meant to intertwine. The deep blues and golds are at
