“I am quite sure that as a person I am not particularly interesting.”

For 60 years after the elusive, solitary Gustav Klimt died in 1918, history agreed with his self-assessment by ignoring him. How could his erotic, ornamental, Byzantine-flat, gold-encrusted portraits of wealthy Viennese hostesses, heavy with the decadence of the over-ripe Habsburg empire, possibly speak to a democratic 20th century that identified its terrors and triumphs in the thrust of cubism, abstraction and minimalism?