> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://blog.fineartamerica.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Gustav Klimt’s Ten Most Famous Paintings - URL: https://blog.fineartamerica.com/gustav-klimts-ten-most-famous-paintings/ - Published: 2026-08-17T10:07:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-21T18:56:33.000Z - Description: From The Kiss to the golden portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer: the ten paintings that made Klimt the shimmering face of Vienna’s Art Nouveau. - Author: Fine Art America - Tags: Famous Paintings, Art History Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) was an Austrian Symbolist painter and the leading figure of the Vienna Secession, the movement that broke with academic tradition and brought Art Nouveau to Austria. Trained as an architectural decorator, Klimt developed a style unlike anyone else’s: sensual figures wrapped in flat, ornamental fields of pattern, mosaic-like geometry, and — in his celebrated “Golden Phase” — real gold and silver leaf inspired by the Byzantine mosaics he saw in Ravenna. His subjects were women, love, life, and death, and his work scandalized Vienna as often as it dazzled it. Today Klimt is among the most beloved and most collected artists in the world, and his paintings routinely set auction records. Here are ten of his most famous works. ## [The Kiss](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-kiss-gustav-klimt.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) [![The Kiss by Gustav Klimt](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/the-kiss-gustav-klimt-clean.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-kiss-gustav-klimt.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) The Kiss (1907–08) is Klimt’s most famous painting and one of the most recognizable images in all of art. A couple kneels on a flower-strewn meadow, wrapped in a single golden cloak: the man’s robe patterned with hard black-and-white rectangles, the woman’s with soft circles and flowers, the two merging into one shimmering form. Painted at the height of his Golden Phase with layers of gold leaf, it was purchased by the Austrian state before it was even finished and remains the centerpiece of the Belvedere in Vienna. ## [Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/7-portrait-of-adele-bloch-bauer-gustav-klimt.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) [![Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I by Gustav Klimt](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/7-portrait-of-adele-bloch-bauer-gustav-klimt.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/7-portrait-of-adele-bloch-bauer-gustav-klimt.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) Often called “The Woman in Gold,” this 1907 portrait of the Viennese society hostess Adele Bloch-Bauer took Klimt three years to complete. Adele’s face and hands emerge from an almost overwhelming field of gold leaf, Egyptian eyes, spirals, and Byzantine ornament, so that she appears less like a sitter than an icon. Looted by the Nazis and the subject of a landmark restitution case, the painting sold in 2006 for $135 million — then the highest price ever paid for a painting. ## [The Tree of Life (Stoclet Frieze)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-stoclet-frieze-the-tree-of-life-gustav-klimt.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) [![The Tree of Life by Gustav Klimt](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/the-stoclet-frieze-the-tree-of-life-gustav-klimt.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-stoclet-frieze-the-tree-of-life-gustav-klimt.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) The Tree of Life is the central panel of the Stoclet Frieze, a monumental mosaic Klimt designed between 1905 and 1911 for the dining room of the Palais Stoclet in Brussels. Its spiraling golden branches, studded with eyes, triangles, and a single black bird, connect earth and sky in an ancient symbol of life, growth, and the unity of all things. It is the only landscape in Klimt’s Golden Phase and remains one of the most reproduced images of the Art Nouveau era. ## [The Three Ages of Woman](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/9-the-three-ages-of-woman-gustav-klimt.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) [![The Three Ages of Woman by Gustav Klimt](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/9-the-three-ages-of-woman-gustav-klimt.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/9-the-three-ages-of-woman-gustav-klimt.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) The Three Ages of Woman (1905) presents the cycle of life in a single vertical composition: a sleeping infant held by a young mother, both wrapped in a veil of flowers and color, beside an aged woman who turns away, her body rendered with unflinching realism. Set against an abstract field of dark and patterned bands, the painting is Klimt’s meditation on beauty, motherhood, and mortality, and it won the gold medal at the 1911 International Exhibition in Rome. ## [Danaë](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/17-danae-gustav-klimt.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) [![Danaë by Gustav Klimt](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/17-danae-gustav-klimt.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/17-danae-gustav-klimt.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) Danaë (1907) retells the Greek myth of the princess locked in a bronze tower, visited by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold. Klimt fills the canvas with the curled, sleeping figure of Danaë, her red hair and purple veil framing a cascade of golden rain that pours between her thighs. Intimate and unapologetically erotic, it is one of the most celebrated works of his Golden Phase and a perfect example of how Klimt used mythology to explore desire and transformation. ## [Judith I (Judith and the Head of Holofernes)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/7-judith-gustav-klimt.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) [![Judith I by Gustav Klimt](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/7-judith-gustav-klimt.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/7-judith-gustav-klimt.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) Judith I (1901) was Klimt’s first painting to incorporate gold leaf, and it caused an uproar. The biblical heroine who beheaded the Assyrian general Holofernes is shown not as a pious savior but as a modern Viennese femme fatale — half-closed eyes, parted lips, a golden choker, and the severed head barely visible at the edge of the frame. The contrast between her languid sensuality and the violence of the story made it one of the defining images of fin-de-siècle Vienna. ## [Water Serpents II](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/6-water-serpents-ii-gustav-klimt.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) [![Water Serpents II by Gustav Klimt](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/6-water-serpents-ii-gustav-klimt.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/6-water-serpents-ii-gustav-klimt.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) Water Serpents II (1904–07) shows a group of nymph-like women floating horizontally through a current of water, their bodies intertwined with swirling hair, golden fish, and patterned fabric. The elongated format and flowing lines give the painting an almost musical rhythm. Like its companion Water Serpents I, it allowed Klimt to depict female intimacy under the cover of mythology, and it became one of the most expensive artworks ever sold when it changed hands privately for a reported $183 million in 2013. ## [Hope II](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/20-hope-ii-gustav-klimt.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) [![Hope II by Gustav Klimt](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/20-hope-ii-gustav-klimt.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/20-hope-ii-gustav-klimt.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) Hope II (1907–08) depicts a pregnant woman with bowed head, her body covered by a vast patterned cloak of gold, red, and geometric color, while a skull rests near her belly and three women pray at her feet. Klimt’s first version, Hope I, had shocked viewers with its nude pregnant figure; in this second version the ornament softens the image without diminishing its meaning — the nearness of new life and death, and the quiet faith that carries a mother through both. It now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. ## [Portrait of Emilie Flöge](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-emilie-floge-gustav-klimt.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) [![Portrait of Emilie Flöge by Gustav Klimt](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/3-emilie-floge-gustav-klimt.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/3-emilie-floge-gustav-klimt.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) Emilie Flöge was a Viennese fashion designer and Klimt’s lifelong companion, and this 1902 portrait marks the moment his mature style arrived. Emilie stands in a flowing blue-and-gold dress covered with spirals and squares — very likely one of her own reform-dress designs — against a mottled, flattened background. The face is realistic, the gown is pure decoration, and the combination became the formula for every great Klimt portrait that followed. ## [Flower Garden (Bauerngarten)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/8-flower-garden-gustav-klimt.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) [![Flower Garden by Gustav Klimt](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f8/9a/f89a4877-1344-4bea-9ca0-cb87912cf056/content/images/2026/08/8-flower-garden-gustav-klimt.jpg)](https://fineartamerica.com/featured/8-flower-garden-gustav-klimt.html?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com) Painted in 1907 during a summer at Lake Attersee, Flower Garden is one of Klimt’s finest landscapes: a dense triangular mound of poppies, daisies, zinnias, and roses that fills the square canvas almost to the edges, with barely a glimpse of sky. The brushwork owes something to Van Gogh and the Pointillists, but the all-over pattern is unmistakably Klimt. It sold at auction in 2017 for £48 million, one of the highest prices ever paid for a landscape. Gustav Klimt’s paintings remain as radiant today as when they scandalized Vienna more than a century ago, and his golden portraits and jewel-like landscapes are among the most popular works of art for the home. Every painting in this list is available as a museum-quality print — on paper, canvas, metal, or acrylic, framed or unframed — so you can bring a touch of Viennese gold to your own walls. [Shop Gustav Klimt prints here](https://fineartamerica.com/art/gustav+klimt?ref=blog.fineartamerica.com), and explore the rest of our famous paintings collection for more of the world’s most beloved masterpieces.