Gustav Klimt Art Prints

Gustav Klimt Art Print

Gustav Klimt was an Austrian painter in the prominent Vienna Secession artistic movement. Between 1876 and 1918, the artist created beautiful and elaborate paintings of women, men, and landscapes. The Kiss and the Adele Bloch-Bauer portraits by Gustav Klimt are some of the frequently reproduced paintings in the world.

Over the course of his long career, Klimt moved through several different phases. His artwork broadly fits into the following categories.

• Architectural: As a student in the 1870s, Klimt mostly focused on architectural and landscape painting. He used traditional styles and primarily worked on murals and ceiling designs.
• Vienna Secession: In 1897, Klimt joined several other unconventional young artists to form the Vienna Secession. He began experimenting with a flat style of painting that featured areas of intense detail, planes of flat color, and elongated human beings. Klimt Vienna secession style often had radical, symbolistic, or allegorical themes.
• Golden Phase: After his work with Vienna Secession, Gustav Klimt was inspired by mosaics to create huge golden paintings filled with detail. His painting, the Kiss, is from this time.
• Portraits: Klimt became a society favorite for his commissioned paintings of women like Adele Bloch-Bauer.
• Later Works: As he aged, Gustav Klimt moved from the finer detail of his Vienna and Golden paintings to a more folk art-inspired look. Many of these paintings and drawings are incomplete due to his death.

Gustav Klimt is known for his somewhat unusual painting sizes, and he worked mostly on square canvases. The artist painted several massive paintings and murals that stood several feet high, but Klimt also created intricate little sketches that are just a few inches tall. When made into prints, Gustav Klimt works are usually slightly cropped to fit traditional picture frame sizes. Prints may be anywhere from 5 inches to 5 feet tall.

The artist layered his canvas with thick layers of gold leaf, textured paint, glass, oil paint, buttons, metal, and stucco. When these Gustav Klimt paintings are reproduced as prints, Giclee or lithograph technologies ensure that all the texture and detail are captured on the canvas or paper.

You can often find mass-produced prints based on Klimt's work, but during Klimt's lifetime, he only produced a single 300 edition print set called Das Werk. Published in the early 1900s, these Klimt prints are highly collectible. Every print is marked with a special signet designed by Klimt and printed in golden ink. Each limited editions set contained fifty prints that were divided into allegorical, symbolist, landscapes, mythical, and portrait categories.