Before ‘The Kiss,’ Gustav Klimt Got His First Big Art Assignment at This Austrian Theater. Now Visitors Can See His Ceiling Paintings Up Close for the First Time

As a young man, the artist who later became famous for working gold leaf into portraits earned a Golden Cross of Merit from an emperor for his contributions to Vienna’s Burgtheater

Mary Randolph | Correspondent

May 7, 2026 3:13 p.m.

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The hottest ticket in Vienna right now offers the chance to climb some scaffolding.

Vienna’s Burgtheater is offering tours of its 60-foot-high ceiling, where for the first time the public can see some of Gustav Klimt’s earliest artworks up close.

Klimt, his brother Ernst and fellow Austrian Franz Matsch created 10 oil paintings for the ceiling of the theater from 1886 to 1888—Klimt’s first big commission.

“The special thing about Klimt for me at least is that we only know about his later works,” says Hannes Höllinger to the Associated Press’ Philipp Jenne. Höllinger went on one of the recent Klimt tours and says it “was very interesting to see that already at age 24 he made these very beautiful paintings which I myself had not seen before.”

Klimt was born outside of Vienna and trained as an architectural painter, but after the death of Ernst and his father in 1892, he moved toward a more personal style. Much of his most famous work happened during his “Golden Phase” in the 1890s and early 1900s, when he frequently used gold leaf in his portraits of upper-class women.

“Klimt epitomizes fin de siècle Austrian Modernism more than any other artist,” Austrian action house im Kinsky said in a statement after a lost Klimt painting was rediscovered. “His work, particularly his portraits of successful women from the upper-middle class at the turn of the century, enjoy the highest recognition worldwide.”

Indeed, today Klimt is exhibited widely. One portrait made history last fall as the most expensive work of modern art ever sold at auction.

“The role of Klimt is that of a sort of holy figure of Vienna’s cultural life,” said Wolfgang Kos, then the director of the Wien Museum, to the New York Times’ Nicolai Hartvig in 2012.

Less is widely known about Klimt’s earlier work, like that installed at the Burgtheater. The paintings depict scenes from Western theater history ranging from ancient Greece to the 1800s. One painting, which depicts Queen Elizabeth I watching Romeo and Juliet at the Globe Theater, features the three painters in the audience and is Klimt’s only known self-portrait.

The Burgtheater was founded in 1741. In 1776, Joseph II named it the German national theater. It reopened in its current location in 1888 after the completion of the paintings. Franz Josef I awarded Klimt the Golden Cross of Merit for his work on the theater.

“If you call Klimt an interior decorator, you have to use the term in the best possible sense,” said Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, then the director of MAK, Vienna’s museum of applied arts, to the Times in 2012.

The Burgtheater is currently restoring the paintings from water damage, and the scaffolding (and tours) will remain until August.

“We were allowed to invest several hundred thousand euros to let Gustav Klimt shine in his original splendor again,” Burgtheater commercial director Robert Beutler tells the AP. “Everything gets cleaned by hand with very fine cotton swabs and condensed water.”

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Mary Randolph is a former editorial intern with Smithsonian magazine.