An erratic genius is the first president of the "Secession," Gustav Klimt (born 1862). He began with graceful, brilliant, but perfectly normal decorative painting. Klimt. Today he is the enfant terrible even of the very latest and wildest modern school. Though greatly influenced by Beardsley and many Frenchmen, he is always original; every square inch of his paintings is unmistakably Klimt and no other. He was the most suggestive of the moderns, leaving a great deal unsaid always; this often gives his pictures charm, but more often they are phantastic riddles for the onlooker. His colours are beautiful. He is especially great at silvery light and all the other tricks of atmosphere.

He paints everything, letting his imagination run riot in landscapes and portraits, as well as in genre and allegory. -Leon Kellner An excerpt from the Preface: .Of these modern painters, the Jungen, the most brilliant is Gustav Klimt, who, in the interpretation of his very original and, generally, most distinguished, conceptions, has not fallen into any of those eccentricities of technique which have well-near proved the undoing of some of his fellow-reformers. In their search for new methods and their determination to break away from the old, they have become "plein-air-ists," "vibrists," and "pointillists,"-the President of the Secession himself, Josef Engelhart, has turned pointillist, at least for the present; at the Exposition, he is represented by a not very interesting painting of a peasant at a table, and some pastels. Klimt, on the contrary, while availing himself of all the saner methods of oil-painting, has avoided all the tricks which defeat their own object by remaining palpable tricks. In his decorations in the spandrels of the staircase of the Royal Imperial Court Museum, the K. K. Kunsthistorischen Hof-Museums in Vienna, executed in connection with Ernst Klimt and Franz Matsch, he has even excelled his two confreres, and produced, in the narrow and awkward triangles assigned the painters, works of pure decoration that in quality and style are quite worthy to rank with the famous ones of Baudry and Delaunay in the Paris Opera-house.

In his most recent important work, shown at the last exhibition of the Secession in Vienna and in the gallery devoted to these painters at the Paris Exposition, he has been much less lucid, and has in a measure justified the reproach which has been levelled at him, of being more an intellectual painter than a colorist,-the "intellectual " in painting, as is generally known, signifying usually confusion and obscurity. As a very important work, by one of the most talented of the modern painters of Europe, and thereby to some extent representative of the tendencies of the modern movement not only in Austria but throughout the Continent.