Gustav Klimt
Vienna Secession, gold leaf, and several thousand drawings that are the practical market.
Gustav Klimt was born at Baumgarten near Vienna in 1862, the son of a gold engraver, and began as a successful decorator of public buildings before breaking with the establishment to found the Vienna Secession in 1897. The ceiling paintings commissioned by the university were rejected as pornographic and later destroyed in the war. The gold-ground pictures of the following decade — The Kiss, the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer — are among the most reproduced images in Western art, and their restitution histories are among the best known in the field. He also painted landscapes in square format at the Attersee. He died in 1918.
The paintings are few, are almost entirely in institutions, and carry restitution and provenance questions that must be settled before anything else; wartime and pre-war ownership history is the first document requested, not the last. The practical market is the drawings, of which several thousand survive — pencil studies of women, sparse and rapid, sometimes with a red or blue crayon accent. Attribution among them is not straightforward and the Strobl catalogue is the reference. Paper is generally thin and often light-struck. Later reproductions are extremely common.
If you own a work by Gustav Klimt
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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