Despite bearing a striking resemblance to 70s rent-a-tent warbler Demis Roussos, Gustav Klimt wasn't Greek and didn't sing like a giant Bee Gee. After leaving the Viennese School of Arts and Crafts, he set himself up as a decorative painter along with his brother Ernst and another student. One of their first big jobs was to do the pics for a snazzy new theatre in their home city, Vienna. Emperor Franz-Josef was so chuffed with the lads' work that he awarded Gustav a prestigious gold cross of merit (and three complimentaries for 'Saturday Night Fever').
More successes followed but when Vienna University commissioned some really gi-normous pictures for their Great Hall it led to a kerfuffle that would drag on for ages, ending up with Gustav re-examining his integrity, throwing away his big ladder, and concentrating on studio work. The long and short of it was that the academic fuddy duddies reckoned Gustav's pictures were just too sexy. Which wasn't surprising because he did once say that all art was erotic, citing the example of the cross, which he said represented a horizontal woman being penetrated by a vertical man (he was the kind of bloke who would probably find a dead ferret erotic).
He spent the rest of his life producing landscape, portrait and figure paintings. Whilst working on his canvases of beautiful models Gustav would often be so completely overcome with desire that he'd spontaneously lay down his brushes then make passionate love to them (the models, not the brushes). In between all the brushing and bonking Gustav also found time to establish the Vienna Secession.
