It was at a rapid pace that Gustav Klimt and his colleagues executed decorations for theater buildings across the crown lands built by Fellner & Helmer. After the death of Hans Makart in 1884, the members of the “Künstler-Compagnie” ranked among the leading painters of their generation, and they received their first commission for the decoration of a public building on Vienna’s Ringstraße.

Gustav Klimt’s allegories for the staircase of the Imperial-Royal Court Museum of Art History can be considered the acme of his activities as a decorator of Ringstraße buildings. They were also his last successful commission as a decorator of a public building. At this time, Klimt began painting commissioned portraits for the bourgeoisie and became involved in the project of the Faculty Paintings for the University of Vienna.

These years mark a caesura in Klimt’s oeuvre. He and Franz Matsch had received the commission to jointly execute the Faculty Paintings, which were to keep them busy over the following eleven years. Noticeably distancing himself from the academic and historically informed approach to painting, Klimt increasingly embraced Symbolism. In 1897 the break with artistic tradition culminated in the foundation of the Secession.

In the period between the foundation of the Secession in 1897 and the scandal surrounding the Faculty Painting of Philosophy in 1900, Gustav Klimt finally mutated into an exponent of Modernist art. In the Secession’s exhibitions he presented himself with the paintings for Nicolaus Dumba, as well as with Pallas Athene, Nuda Veritas, his monumental female portraits, and his first landscapes.

Between 1901 and 1903, Gustav Klimt created some of the most important works of his entire oeuvre: the Faculty Paintings, the Beethoven Frieze, and Hope I. In the "Klimt-Kollektive" ["Gustav Klimt Collective Exhibition"], his first solo exhibition at the Vienna Secession, he presented himself as a painter of female portraits, landscapes of square format, and mysterious underwater worlds.

The oil paintings created between 1907 and 1909 date from the height of Klimt’s Golden Period: first of all, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I and the monumental icon The Kiss (Lovers). At this time, Klimt also worked on the frieze for the Stoclet Palace in Brussels. What is more, the Klimt group organized two of the most important and comprehensive exhibitions of Viennese Modernism, the "Kunstschau Wien 1908" and the "Internationale Kunstschau 1909".

Klimt devoted the years leading up to World War I to the working drawings for the Stoclet Frieze. Along with the allegorical paintings Death and Life and The Virgin, the artist primarily created female portraits. Landscapes showing Lake Garda and paintings of Kammer Castle demonstrate that Klimt developed an increasingly painterly style.

In the last three years of his life, Gustav Klimt increasingly turned to the female portrait. He celebrated both illustrious personalities and anonymous models with his painterly refinement and Asian motifs. As to the landscapes, the artist drew his inspirations from his stays on the Attersee until 1916, while in his allegories he continued to deal with the theme of Eros and Thanatos.