Klimt bought his own paintings back from the state

In 1894 the Austrian Ministry of Education commissioned two painters to decorate the ceiling of the University of Vienna's Great Hall. Gustav Klimt, then thirty-two, was given three of the panels: Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence, the faculties that were meant to show, in the spirit of the brief, the triumph of light over darkness. He was a safe choice. He had spent a decade painting exactly that kind of thing, staircases and theatre ceilings in the grand historical manner, and the state was pleased with him.

Three years later he walked out of the Vienna artists' establishment. On 3 April 1897 Klimt and a group of younger painters and architects founded the Secession, with Klimt as its first president, and by 1898 they had their own building, a white cube with a golden dome by Joseph Maria Olbrich, and a motto over the door: To every age its art, to art its freedom. It read as a declaration. The university was about to find out what it meant.

Philosophy went on show in March 1900 at the Secession. Instead of the triumph of light, Klimt had painted a column of naked, drifting bodies from childhood to old age and a vast, veiled face emerging from the dark. Vienna was appalled. Eighty-seven professors signed a petition asking the ministry to keep the painting off their ceiling. That same year it won the gold medal at the Paris World Exhibition, which changed nothing at home.

Medicine, shown in March 1901, was worse for everyone. The faculty had expected a celebration of healing. Klimt gave them another river of bodies with a skeleton drifting among them, and at the bottom Hygieia, the goddess of health, in gold and red with the snake of Asclepius coiled around her arm, looking out at the viewer as if the question of whether medicine could save anyone was not her problem. A medical journal complained that the painting left out the achievements of medicine altogether. A public prosecutor was called in. The affair reached the Austrian parliament, the first time that body had ever debated a painting, and when the Academy of Fine Arts elected Klimt to a professorship that year, the government declined to confirm it. The Minister of Education was, by most accounts, the only person in officialdom still defending him.

In April 1905 Klimt ended it himself. He wrote to the ministry resigning the commission and returned the advance, 30,000 crowns, a sum he did not have. August Lederer, the industrialist who was becoming his most important patron, put up the money and received Philosophy in return. The designer Koloman Moser later bought Medicine and Jurisprudence. Klimt's public comment was not diplomatic: he had had enough of censorship, he said, and he wanted no state support of any kind. Two months later he and his allies lost a vote inside the Secession by a single ballot and left that too. From then on he painted for private clients, which is why the gold portraits of Vienna's wives exist at all.

The three paintings ended up, through the Lederer collection, in Schloss Immendorf in Lower Austria. In May 1945, retreating SS troops set fire to the castle. Everything in it is believed lost. What survives of the most argued-over paintings in Austrian history is a set of preparatory drawings, black-and-white photographs, and one colour photograph of the Hygieia figure from Medicine, the image at the top of this letter. The most controversial work of Klimt's career can now only be seen through the records of people who wanted to remember it.

The professors were not stupid and Klimt was not a martyr. They had ordered a picture of what their disciplines believed about themselves, and he delivered a picture of what he believed about them: that philosophy does not resolve, that medicine does not always heal, and that the human body drifting through both is the only certainty on offer. Both sides were right about what the paintings said. They disagreed about whether a university ceiling was the place to say it. Klimt's answer, paid for in cash he had to borrow, was that the place was never the point. The freedom was.

Next Sunday: a thirty-four-metre frieze Klimt painted straight onto the Secession's walls for a ten-week show in 1902, why it was never meant to survive, and the ninety-year argument about who owns it.

WATCH · The full Klimt exhibition: twenty masterpieces, sixty minutes, one painting at a time

SEE · The Secession building, Vienna, with the motto still over the door

LEARN · The full record of the three lost ceilings, with the surviving photographs

Watch the Klimt exhibition

Gustav Klimt, Hygieia, detail of the faculty painting Medicine, 1900-1907. Destroyed at Schloss Immendorf, May 1945; surviving colour photograph. Public domain (artist died 1918); image via Wikimedia Commons.