Gustav Klimt’s Hunger to Please

He was born in 1862, in the village of Baumgarten. Gold was in his blood—his father was a skilled engraver of it—but the family was always on the brink of poverty. As a scholarship kid at Vienna’s School of Arts and Crafts, Klimt impressed his teachers and prepared for a life spent painting big, history-burnishing murals for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A scarily perfect drawing of a male nude, done the year he turned eighteen, suggests both the conventional career that was his for the taking and, in subtler ways, the one he took. The figure, which has been outlined with great care and shaded into lifelikeness, reclines on a bed, but since the bed is more crudely drawn than the rest, he almost seems to be drifting through nothingness. It is hard to say if his right leg is tensed or slack, if this is a pose or the absence of one.