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Gustav Klimt's work brilliantly negotiates the borders between traditional and modern, figurative and non-figurative art. His subtly erotic portraits, richly patterned landscapes and enigmatic allegorical compositions are at once sensuous and refined, while his extravagant, ornamental style verges on abstraction. Obliged to go his own way when he was denied public commissions, Klimt became the leader of the modernists in Vienna, during the tragic final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and was perhaps the greatest portraitist of his age, a landscape painter of dazzling originality and above all the creator of extraordinary decorative schemes. 159 illus., 29 in color.
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