Episode Details

Gustav Klimt's shimmering gold leaf portraits now sell for hundreds of millions of dollars, but the man behind them was no gilded aesthete. He was the son of a gold engraver from the Vienna slums, a painter of radical erotic murals that scandalized the Austrian establishment, and an artist whose obsession with sex, death, and decorative beauty produced some of the most recognizable images in Western art.

This episode traces Klimt from his working-class origins through the Vienna Secession movement he led, the university murals that provoked a national scandal, and the golden period — The Kiss, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer — that made him immortal and his paintings among the most expensive ever sold.

• Klimt's working-class childhood and his early career as a conventional decorative painter
• The founding of the Vienna Secession and his break with the artistic establishment
• The university ceiling scandal — erotic murals so controversial the government rejected them
• The golden period, The Kiss, and the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer's record-breaking $135 million sale