 In 1897 he was a founding member and president of the Vienna Secession, a group of artists who wanted to break with what they saw as the prevailing conservatism of the Viennese .Klimt in particular challenged what he saw as the "hypocritical boundaries of respectability set by Viennese society"; according to the art historian Susanna Partsch, he was "the of the Viennese art scene, [and] was acknowledged to be "the" painter of beautiful women".By 1900 he was the preferred portrait painter of the wives of the largely Jewish Viennese bourgeoisie, an emerging class of self-made industrialists who were "buying the innovative new art that state museums rejected", according to the journalist Anne-Marie O'Connor.