Published on the occasion of a major exhibition at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, KLIMT & RODIN: An Artistic Encounter showcases the work of two titans of modernism. Gustav Klimt (Austrian, 1862–1918) was a founding member of the Viennese Secession movement and Auguste Rodin (French, 1840–1917) has been heralded as the “father of modern sculpture.” Both broke with aesthetic conventions to alter irrevocably the course of art history in the twentieth century.

This elegant volume examines the two artists in relationship to one another, charting such similarities as their emergence from Symbolism; the controversy that surrounded some of their most distinctive works; and their exploration of the themes of human psychology, sexuality, desire, and compassion. They died three months apart, and this presentation celebrates their contributions to modernism on the one-hundred-year anniversary of their deaths.

Five essays along with supplemental texts highlight and contextualize the achievements of the painter and the sculptor. Tobias G. Natter illuminates the extraordinary links between the two artists, and shares commentaries on many of Klimt’s iconic paintings. Martin Chapman details Rodin’s celebrity in the early twentieth century at around the time he met Klimt in Vienna. Michael Kausch explores the incredible sense of humanity both artists held and applied to their art. Matthias Haldemann describes the two artists within the larger cultural sphere, which included the writers Rainer Maria Rilke and Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the painter Egon Schiele. And Renée Price writes about two of the artists’ most beloved works that share the same name: The Kiss.

Replete with lavish reproductions of many of the artists’ key pieces, including an opening gallery of details from Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, which Rodin viewed in 1902, and archival photographs of the two men and their studios, KLIMT & RODIN: An Artistic Encounter offers an intimate view of the blossoming of modernism through two of its most impassioned creators.