Summer 1977. A rail journey from Athens to Vienna. With all the usual delays, it will take the train about forty hours to reach Vienna. I am sharing a compartment with a young Japanese lecturer at some art college, who is travelling to the same place. He is one of those typical Far Eastern travellers who perfectly fits the standard cliche. He is going to do Europe in six days, with ten hours for Vienna - after an uninterrupted rail journey of two days and one night. He only has two aims in Vienna: to see Otto Wagner's architecture and - Gustav Klimt' s paintings.

6 Introduction: Klimt"s Popularity

11 Klimt"s Fame

16 Klimt"s Vienna - Then and Now

28 Years of Training

34 Early Works and the Beginning of a Career

5o Early Portraits

58 "Oedipal Revolt" - the Secession

68 Modernity

76 The Faculty Paintings

90 Early Landscapes

97 The Secession Building and its Exhibitions

104 The Beethoven Frieze

114 The Kiss

120 The Three Ages of Woman / Death and Life

126 Hope

140 Judith

144 The Stodet Frieze

154 The Break-Up of the Secession and the 1908

Kunstschau exhibition

166 "I"m not particularly interesting"

172 Landscapes

188 "Solitary Dialogues": Klimt"s Erotic Drawings

200 "The World in Female Form"

208 Danae

210 Ladies" Portraits

224 Late Works

230 Chronology

234 Notes

238 Bibliography