Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0760723230, Unknown Binding)

From the Publisher Gustav Klimt's art is thoroughly fin de siecle. It expresses the apocalyptic atmosphere of Vienna's upper middle class society - a society devoted to the cultivation of aesthetic awareness and the cult of pleasure. The ecstatic joy which Klimt and his contemporaries found - or hoped to find - in beauty was constantly overshadowed by death. And death therefore plays an important role in Klimt's art. Klimt's fame, however, rests on his reputation as one of the greatest erotic painters and graphic artists of his times.