The grandiose Belvedere Palace got the jump on the rest of the city with a show called Gustav Klimt/Josef Hoffmann: Pioneers of Modernism, which opened in October and will finish in early March. Displaying designs by fellow Secessionist Josef Hoffmann, an architect and designer, alongside many pieces from the museum’s expansive collection of Klimt’s paintings – the largest in the world – the exhibition is but a hint at what will be on display starting 12 July, when the jubilee exhibition, Masterpieces in Focus: 150 Years of Gustav Klimt, opens, featuring all of the museum’s Klimt holdings.

On 24 February, the Leopold Museum will open its celebratory exhibit, Klimt: Up Close and Personal. Through postcards and personal affects, as well as paintings and drawings, the massive display focuses on Klimt’s private experience of various journeys he took to Italy, Paris, Brussels and London.

A few weeks later the city’s other heavyweight art museum, the Albertina, unveils Gustav Klimt: The Drawings. With most of the museum’s 170 pieces on display, the rarely seen works, many charged with erotic tension and sensuality, are a pleasing complement to the bold shapes and decorative colours on display in Klimt’s paintings and murals.

Drawings will also be the focus of the Wien Museum’s exhibition, which opens in May. Comprising some 400 drawings, from student sketches to preparatory works to private reveries, the display will also include paintings and prints, as well as the artist’s death mask.

The Austrian Theatre Museum opens it show in May as well. Centred on Klimt’s rarely seen Nuda Veritas painting, the period of its creation will be flushed out with further Secessionist works, as well as texts by contemporary critics and supporters.  

In July, the Künstlerhaus will present Klimt and the Künstlerhaus, focusing on the works the artist created in collaboration with the artists’ association, which also celebrates 150 years this year. In September and October, the exhibition space will redouble its Klimt offerings, as it hosts one of the most novel tributes to the artist this year, Gustav Klimt – The Musical.

Finally, the Klimt Villa will reopen its doors after extensive renovation in July. Klimt’s last, tree-surrounded studio, where he worked from 1912 until his death in 1918, offers a glimpse into his life and working process – something Klimt himself was never very keen to give. “I have never painted a self-portrait,” he once wrote. “Whoever wants to know something about me – as an artist, the only notable thing – ought to look carefully at my pictures and try to see in them what I am and what I want to do.”

The exhibitions across Vienna this year offer the best chance in decades to do exactly that.