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Renowned as an Expressionist painter, the Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) began his career in the decorative arts, studying book illustration, printmaking and typography alongside life drawing at Vienna’s School of Applied Arts between 1904 and 1908. The Dreaming Youths, begun in November 1907 and printed the following June, was Kokoschka’s first major graphic series, produced at the age of 21 while he was still a student. It started as a commission for a children’s picture-book, but Kokoschka set aside his brief after the first illustration, adding verses to create a complex ‘picture-poem’ exploring the desires and anxieties of adolescent sexuality. He described it as ‘a kind of record, in words and pictures, of my own state of mind at the time’, in particular of his love for Lilith Lang, the sister of a fellow student, who appears with him in the final image, The Girl Li and I. He wrote later that ‘the book was my first love-letter’, although his relationship with Lilith had ended by the time it appeared.

The eight colour lithographs display a wide range of artistic influences, from the prevailing Jugendstil or Arts and Crafts aesthetic to Japanese woodcuts and medieval folk art. The stream-of-consciousness text which appears alongside the images also looks back to a medieval past in its use of traditional verse forms and the simple style of German folk-poems which were undergoing a widespread revival in the early 1900s. Yet the emotional intensity of the text, and its themes of sexual awakening, longing and even violence, point to a more radical, expressionist sensibility. It was the juxtaposition of the dreamlike, fairytale images with this jarring, tense prose that led one critic, Ludwig Hevesi, to warn that if the book was originally intended for children, it was certainly ‘not for the children of the philistine’.

The Dreaming Youths was not initially well received when it was exhibited at the Kunstschau, or Art Exhibition, in the summer of 1908, the first show organised jointly by the Klimt Group, The School of Applied Arts and the affiliated Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshops). Few of the original 500 copies printed in 1908 were sold and 275 of them were later bought by Kurt Wolff Verlag in Leipzig to be republished, newly bound, in 1917. Despite its lack of commercial success, however, The Dreaming Youths was one of Kokoschka’s most significant early statements, and the frank, erotic metaphor and personal mythology introduced here would become central to his later artistic productions, both visual and literary.

"As a boy, Kokoschka was not particularly attracted to art. He wanted to study chemistry but was recommended for a scholarship at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts by a teacher who had been impressed by his drawings. He entered the School in 1905, the year in which he started to paint in oils, and in 1907 he found work at the Wiener Werkstötte. Soon he began to expand his activities to literature. Asked to produce a children's book, he wrote his own text, Die Traumenden Knaben (The Dreaming Youths), which was scarcely suitable for the young, but made a good basis for his distinctive illustrations. He also wrote two plays, Sphinx und Strohamann (The Sphinx and the Scarecrow), and Mürder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murderer, Hope of Women): these are now considered to mark the beginnings of Expressionist theatre in Germany.

"In 1908 Kokoschka's work was shown in the Kunstschau exhibition in Vienna, which featured the avant-garde group around Klimt. His contributions were a centre of controversy because of their Expressionist violence, and he was dismissed from the School of Arts and Crafts as a result. In 1909 his work was shown at the second Kunstschau, and his two plays were performed in the little open-air theatre attached to the exhibition buildings. There was a tremendous scandal because of their violence, and their unconventional and apparently irrational structure, and even the Werkstötte would no longer employ him. At one time he managed to keep alive by betting on his own capacity to drink visitors to Vienna under the table. His chief protector was the pioneer Modernist architect Adolf Loos, who secured portrait commissions for him. One portrait was of the satirical writer Karl Kraus, editor of Die Facket (The Torch). Kraus said of this: 'It is quite possible that those who know me will not recognize me. But it is certain that those who do not know me will recognize me.'

"In 1910 Kokoschka's luck changed. He went to Berlin and was taken up by Herwarth Walden, the energetic owner-editor of Der Sturm, who commissioned him to do title-page drawings for the magazine and used one for almost every issue. He was also given a contract by the powerful dealer Paul Cassirer. In 1911 he returned to Vienna and was appointed as assistant teacher at the very school which had dismissed him. He had a show at the Hagenbund in Vienna, of which the opening reception was attended by Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne, who exclaimed indignantly: 'This fellow's bones ought to be broken in his body!' Most important of all, in 1911 he began a passionate affair with Alma Mahler, the widow of the great composer, an elegant society beauty considerably older than himself. The year 1912 was better still - he was able to give up teaching and showed at the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, which united the whole German-speaking avant garde, and with the Blaue Reiter in Munich.

How important is Klimt? His art is one of the central achievements of modernism. Yet he stands off to one side, in his own time and place, a long way from Paris, the capital of modern art. Klimt's art developed in isolation; he is far less influenced by Paris than Russian artists were. Klimt inhabited an odd, archaic culture where old and new fused in quite different ways from anywhere else. Abstract art was developed by the cubists intellectually; Klimt invented his own abstraction in the pursuit of sensuality. The gold world of The Kiss has no limits. Space has melted. Objects float, shimmer, invite us to dissolve and become one with the golden void. Klimt's modernism is not only dissimilar to that of Picasso and Matisse but, in some ways, because it is less pure, it is more available to us now. The way he juxtaposes abstraction and sensual pleasure has a trashy energy, a modernity we know and feel.

Klimt's most modern paintings of all are his landscapes, spaces without boundaries in which we float rather than walk. Cutting off his square of field or flowers from any exterior context, he immerses us in a pulsing pattern of green, brown, silver. This is the woodland of German romanticism and Klimt is the last romantic. His art captivates us because it translates romanticism into a modern language. When we come across it, in a gallery or on a card, we feel the innocence and audacity of Klimt, the man who wanted to kiss the whole world

Klimt stated this philosophy of art most explicitly in a frieze he created for the Secession in 1902 - a temporary decoration for an exhibition inspired by Beethoven. Klimt's Beethoven Frieze insists that happiness is to be found in the senses, in art and love. It shows the struggle of the soul to find happiness, at first protected by a knight in shining armour who does battle with the forces of evil - led by a huge, multiform monster with the face of a gorilla, the body of a snake and the wings of a bird of prey, and wearing a crown; in its vastness, inhumanity and heterogeneity, we can see this as a personification of the empire. The Beethoven Frieze has an extraordinary design; the early stage is shown in open, unpainted space, then we come smack up against the clogged, dense obstacle of the monster and his acolytes - Death, Disease, the Gorgons - crammed into one short wall; then the soul breaks free again into the realm of freedom disclosed by art. It's not the knight who frees us from the monster, not political action, but art. The frieze's final vision is one to which Klimt will keep returning, the one he will consummate in his great modern icon of 1908: The Kiss. The final scene of the Beethoven Frieze has lovers embracing in a golden arched pavil ion, while a chorus of floating angelic figures prays ecstatically. It's called Kiss For The Whole World, a quotation from Schiller's Ode To Joy, which Beethoven set to music at the climax of his Ninth Symphony: an image of universal rapture, communion with the universe in love.

Klimt's celebration of the senses has a modern hardness. On one level, his art is an unbridled glorification of middle-class pleasures. He loved to travel with Alma Schindler, loved to holiday in the country with Emilie Flöge. He designed dresses, which Flöge modelled, expressing his ideals of modernist decoration, and art historians puzzle over his many drawings of women masturbating and lovers copulating; very finished, beautiful drawings. What did he do them for? The answer seems to be for his private enjoyment. They were for him, and for the viewer, as indulgent as sachertorte, and you could see him as "decadent", as giving way to the senses in a corrupt way. But there is something else in his art, a moral conviction, the proffering of an alternative morality. The Kiss is the icon of a post-religious age, and Klimt gives it the glitter and grandeur of an altarpiece. If he cheekily evokes the gleaming glory of religious art, he gives the lovers in The Kiss, with garlands in their hair, a distinctly pagan look. Klimt's art is full of allusions to ancient cultures - Egypt, Greece - in which the irrational was acknowledged, cultures he uses as strands of his post-Christian manifesto for happiness.

This was the world of the interior decorator and fine artist Gustav Klimt, as well as that of Sigmund Freud. The father of psychoanalysis, a passionate enthusiast for Italian Renaissance art, must have often seen Klimt's murals as he climbed the grand staircase of Vienna's Kunsthistorischesmuseum to look at sensual dream images by Correggio and Bellini.

Gustav Klimt was an influential Austrian painter of the late 19th Century,
one of the founders and leaders of the Vienna Secession art movement, although
he would later move beyond it.

Klimt was born in Vienna, in 1862, into a lower middle-class family
of Moravian origin. His father, Ernst Klimt, worked as an engraver and
goldsmith, earning very little, and the artist's childhood was spent in
relative poverty. The painter would have to support his family financially
throughout his life.

Together with his two brothers, Gustav was sent to the Vienna School
of Arts and Crafts, in order to follow in his father's footsteps as an
engraver and craftsman. The School of Arts and Crafts had been founded
as the lower-class version of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. However,
the education it gave its students was excellent, covering both the technical
and historical aspects of art. Additionally, exceptional students were
given the chance to attend classes at the Academy itself.

Klimt soon demonstrated his talent and would be commissioned to paint
several large decorative works by the age of twenty. Together with his
younger brother Ernst Klimt and Franz Matsch, who would also become a notable
painter of the period, Gustav worked on designs for the 1879 Festzug --
a procession intended to celebrate the 25th wedding anniversary of Emperor
Franz Josef and the Empress Elizabeth.
The director of the project was Hans Makart, the leading Austrian painter
of the day.